an international and interdisciplinary journal
of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 2, September 2005, ISSN
1552-5112
An Interview with Gerry Coulter
Dr. Gerry Coulter is Professor and Chairperson of
the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bishop’s University in
Lennoxville, Quebec, Canada. In 2002 he founded the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (On The Internet). www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies
Nicholas Ruiz III: What led you
to create the International Journal of
Baudrillard Studies?[1]
Gerry
Coulter: I have been interested in
contemporary (especially European) theory for more than twenty years since my
days as an undergraduate in Philosophy. The creation of IJBS was the culmination of that long term interest and an intense
period of reading and reflection on Baudrillard’s work in particular over a
number of years. I have reached a position where Baudrillard and Virilio are
the major theorists making the most sense to me. Baudrillard and I come from
similar backgrounds, the distrust of culture and academe, a passage through
sociology – we have similar motivations.
IJBS is a product of a
sabbatical in Strasbourg, France during 2002-2003. The first part of my
sabbatical was dedicated to a chronological re-reading of Baudrillard by date
of original publication in French. Like most English readers I had read his
works in the order of English translation. The work of 1968 arrived in the
1990’s while some works of the 1970’s and 1980s appeared a year or two after
publication in French. So, along with some papers and interviews I had not
read, I reread Baudrillard’s entire oeuvre in the order of the original
publication. This provided me with an opportunity to reflect on the appearance
of Baudrillard’s thought over thirty-five years (something that has been of great
importance to me in subsequent writing on Baudrillard – especially a paper I
wrote last year: “Baudrillard’s
One Great Thought”).[2]
IJBS
came to me in the wee hours of the morning as my most interesting and lasting
ideas do. After four hours sleep I often work for a couple of hours in the
night. It is an extraordinary time for quiet reading and contemplation. In mid
December 2002 one of these saw the idea for IJBS
form in my mind. I opened a computer file and jotted down numerous ideas for
the journal and what it would look like. The last thing in that entry reads:
“Necessity: need for a place for publication of work by, on and related to, Baudrillard;
need for a place for writing on Baudrillard by scholars who wish peer review
but who wish to push the envelope of traditional academic writing and
publishing; need for a place that can be a central clearing house for
ideas/events etc “things” Baudrillardian”; need for a scholarly venture on
Baudrillard that will be not only the best thing on the web about Baudrillard,
but will drive a wedge into the “pay-per use” journal industry. I had no
interest in participating in the “pay-per” journal industry – the internet
provides us the opportunity to share our ideas outside of the limits of the
capitalist marketplace – IJBS has been and will remain an open access journal.
I compliment you at Kritikos for your
efforts in this area as well. These efforts are vitally important for access to
scholarship around the world.
The
next step was contacting numerous people who had written books about
Baudrillard and who were deeply interested in his work (Gary Genosko, Tilottama
Rajan, Rex Butler, Sylvère Lotringer, Victoria Grace, Alan Cholodenko and later
others who wrote in the area of French theory) to share my idea and ask if they
would be willing to support the venture by working as Editors of what was to be
in 12 months (January 2004 we posted Volume 1-1), the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. The response of these
first editors was enthusiastic and supportive. Only one person wished to remain
outside of the IJBS board but he has
read papers for us and been extremely supportive over the past two years. With
my idea and initial editorial board, the final step was to sit down with Jean
in Paris.
Jean
is a remarkably shy person when you first meet him and one who is wisely very
skeptical about interactions with academics. He listened to my idea for the
journal, asked me a few probing questions, and was generally impressed by my
motivations and by the initial Editorial Board. After a quiet minute in which
he carefully read my face, he turned away toward the street as one does in a
Parisian cafe, thought for a few moments, turned to me again and said: “This
project has my entire support”. I asked him if he would like to be on the
Editorial Board to which he agreed. The rest is history with over 30
peer-reviewed articles and book reviews from scholars around the world
appearing in our first four issues. My role is to be the nexus point through
which the whole thing functions: articles come to me, I send them out for blind
review, they come back to me, I send readers assessments to authors, revisions
return to me; the book review requests come to me, I see that people get the
books from the publisher, and edit the final reviews. I also participate in the
final proof reading for the papers and reviews and the final “on screen”
appearance check. I am very fortunate to have Lyne (Gregoire) who does all of
our HTML setup for the web. She has been a real joy to work with and a patient
professional under time constraints. In short, all the communication involved
in IJBS is thorough my desk. I do my
best to “keep out of the way” of the work of the editors and have tried to
implement all of their suggestions, each of which has made us a stronger
journal as we become known around the world. IJBS exists to take Baudrillard seriously and to do that means to
challenge him as well. As my Editorial to Volume 2-1 points out, many articles
in that issue got into the challenge quite seriously. Articles and reviews
posted on our website will take over 40,000 hits this year (our second year of
operation). We are off to a very good start and I am delighted with the
submissions we already have for the next issue including a couple of strong
challenges to Baudrillard.
I
have been asked a similar question: “Why Baudrillard, why now?” My answer is
that if Baudrillard is right, humanity may well have entered its terminal phase
– like Baudrillard I am interested in things that shock me – recent
developments in media and consumerism, the infantalization of society, the
death of the social, the end of the university – all of these things shock me.[3]
Given the magnitude of the experiment humanity is conducting on itself to see
if anything human can survive (through the genome project, cloning,
nanotechnology and Cyborg research etc.) it is a perfect time to challenge the
perfect crime. IJBS is a kind of
intellectual virus that uses the system it challenges to proliferate. If we
succeed it will be in relation to how much and how well we can motivate people
to take Baudrillard’s writing seriously which includes important challenges to
established power in “disciplined” academe. So far I am pleased to see that the
organizers of the “Engaging Baudrillard”[4]
conference in Swansea, Wales in 2006 have posted the call for papers as a
“celebration of the establishment of Baudrillard
Studies”. That came to me as a very pleasant surprise. I am also delighted
to see important contemporary thinkers such as John Armitage and Douglas
Kellner planning to devote an entire issue of their very good looking new
journal project Cultural Politics[5]
to papers on Baudrillard although their later venture is unfortunately wedded
to the traditional capitalist pay-per use industry.[6]
As
for me, I have reached a point in my life where I am very pleased with the
development of my own thinking and writing (there is no better reason for
thinking and writing than the experience of pleasure) and IJBS is an important part of that. I am extremely gratified by the
efforts of our editors and contributors. Jean has been very supportive and in
becoming a friend I can tell you what his older friends have known all along –
Baudrillard is not only a remarkably intelligent person, but also an
exceptionally gracious one. In case the secret is not yet out – Jean
Baudrillard is a nice guy! The other editors I work with are also a very
enthusiastic and hard working group – each one of them possess a particular
spark of brilliance – and they also happen to very a very rewarding group of
people to work with. IJBS works
because of how well its editors and readers work.
As
for the journal, there are directions in which IJBS should go but we are already, after four issues, further along
than I could have hoped when I launched Volume 1-1 nineteen months ago. I’d
like to see more work on art and literature, but Volume 3-1 will contain at
least two papers that address this and Volume 2-2 contained one. This has been
a fantastic experience – a tremendous amount of work, but a labour of love. I
am very grateful to the hundreds of people who have E-mailed me about IJBS –
suggestions, compliments, constructive criticisms, ways in which users are
deploying things we publish for pedagogic purposes. I’ve always told students
to pursue research interests they love – I finally have started taking my own
advice!
NRIII: Much of the
criticism Baudrillard’s work has received over the past years indicts him of
the “intellectual crime” of not being serious, rigorous or political enough to
be taken seriously. Susan Sontag’s
comments on Baudrillard, as you point out the latest issue of IJBS, is
an instance of this criticism. How would you describe Baudrillard’s work in
terms of intellectual currency? Is Baudrillard engaged in theory, philosophy,
political commentary, etc.?
GC: Jean’s writing is the result of what has been for
him an enjoyable process of passing through a series of disciplines until he
arrived at a horizon somewhere in the distance from traditional academe – but
with remarkable implications for academe. We are seeing an explosion of
interest in his work over the past five years by graduate students around the
world.
His
writing has recorded his experience of a joyful wisdom pursuing some original
ways of thinking and adding original insights to established paths. His entire
oeuvre records his effort to achieve escape velocity from traditional academe
and the intelligentsia, his pursuit of the fragment, and the Nothing, which
always waits at the end of the search for something. His writing records the
thought processes of a remarkably intelligent and fascinating thinker who has
pushed theory to the limits of endurance. The result is the most important
development in contemporary theory: theory as challenge – a permanently
radicalized position that constantly challenges the real to expose itself as
illusion. Baudrillard’s writing offers many lessons on avoiding petty-academic
squabbles and jealousy, and on avoiding the role of the loyal intellectual –
something even Chomsky succumbs to as I point out in my paper on Sontag.[7]
I
arrive at Baudrillard as someone with an interest in McLuhan (not the popular
version of McLuhan, but the darker McLuhan), and Guy Debord. Jean has very
original contributions to make to our understanding of mediatization and
digitalization (see especially the articles “Baudrillard
Bytes” and “Phantom
Objectivity” by Jan Harris and Paul Taylor in IJBS 2-2 (July 2005)
for a further explication of these). Jean’s writing is not about happy events;
this is not a good time for humanity. We are subjecting ourselves to a horrible
experiment, which will tell us if anything human can survive. The post human is
a very real spectre haunting us now. Jean has a finely attenuated sense of
irony and despite the seriousness of our situation, it is impossible not to
burst out laughing at various points in his texts. What you must share with
Baudrillard to get Baudrillard is the sheer joy he takes in arriving at his
understandings of the contemporary – even if he or we do not like the
conclusions we reach, it is so satisfying not to be drawn into the traditional
constraints of academe (none worse, as Paul Taylor points out, than playing the
role of Pangloss). It is against such a vision of the loyal academic or loyal
intellectual that Baudrillard reserves a certain freedom. This is also where
the joy in teaching while using Baudrillard’s texts emerges. I went through
university when almost everyone who wasn’t supporting Reagan and Thatcher was
being turned into an existentialist or a Marxist (usually the former followed
by the later). It is joyful to explore with students today the overlaps between
literature and theory and to encourage them to envision different modes of
enquiry and writing from those established by sociology and other disciplines a
century ago. The students we get in sociology and cultural studies today have
already opted not to be in business and technical programs and they have
demonstrated an intelligence that surpasses their high-school guidance
counsellors who push so many in these mundane directions. The majority of
students who elect to take a course called “contemporary theory” are confident
and intelligent and fairly pissed-off with the society in which they live. They
feel enormous constraints which writers like Baudrillard both acknowledge and
explode. The best text I have ever used for an introductory theory class was
Baudrillard’s Screened Out. In each
class we read one or two of the short articles (almost all of which appeared in
Liberation between 1985 and 1998)
combined with weekly analytical writing. I had never before witnessed a class
enjoy reading and writing and exploring their own expanding thinking capacities
so much. Choosing that text was a real risk – I learned more than I expected
about teaching – but isn’t half or more of good teaching about taking risks?
So,
for me, Baudrillard’s work is theory, theory that challenges theory and while
doing so passes through many disciplines. It also has very important pedagogic
uses. Numerous scholars around the world are pushing at the boundaries of
established pedagogic practices using Baudrillard’s work (to better understand
media, digitalization, terrorism etc). Some of this work will appear in IJBS in coming issues. Philosophy can
rightly claim Baudrillard and numerous younger philosophers are finding him
difficult to ignore. Sociology has little claim on him. Sociology is however
entering a very unstable phase. Journals like IJBS make it increasingly difficult for the disciplinary police to
do their job patrolling the boundaries of this and other disciplines. The
primary vehicles of surveillance and containment through the journals have been
the literature review and methodological limitations. Sociology has managed to
pass through positivism rather well in the past twenty years. As for the
literature, it has exploded – attempting to contain contemporary theory writing
in any one discipline is a form of brutal confinement. Until
multidisciplinarity becomes the academic equivalent of INTERPOL, and you can be
sure most of it will – we have at least a brief opening. The blurring of
boundaries between disciplines and the early eruptions of a post-disciplinary
environment make the present a very good time to come from Sociology. Sociology
is perhaps better placed than most of the disciplines to enjoy the
post-disciplinary – but it is important to pass through all disciplines.[8]
NRIII: What is the difference, if any, between the work for which most people
seem to know Baudrillard (simulation, hyperreality, etc.) and what he is doing
today (e.g. Le Pacte de lucidité ou l'intelligence du mal)?
GC:
Aside from the banal
discussions surrounding the Matrix
movies Baudrillard has not suffered the trivialization and public “dumbing
down” that say McLuhan’s work has in the popular media – perhaps this will come
with time. I guess Baudrillard is most well known for his penetrating analysis
of what it means to live in the world of screens and the impact media and
digitalized technology is having on us. His work on simulation and simulacra –
where absence is sovereign – is also very important. Some observers have said
that Baudrillard has enjoyed a reinvigoration after 9-11. Certainly the strike
of events ended with 9/11. We must be careful though in looking for any break
in Baudrillard’s work around 9/11. His
interview after 9/11 with Der Spiegel[9]
is consistent with his position on terrorism and the state since the early
1980s. Baudrillard is a survivor of the 20th century – the century where he was
an adolescent under Hitler, the catastrophes of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the
camps of Stalin, then De Gaul’s France – all before he was 30 years old. Since
then he has watched the constant and terrifyingly successful effort to build a
post catastrophic, globalizing mass-mediated consumerist consensus. This
prepared him to be much more fearful of a state capable of ending terrorism,
than terrorism itself. People who think Baudrillard supports terrorism, a
ridiculous position that betrays a lack of reading his work, do not seem to
understand this. In any event, there is no break in Baudrillard after 9/11.
Baudrillard’s
response to 9/11 has led to an increase of interest in his writing. 9/11 and Baudrillard
were made for each other and he reached a certain notoriety for the Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin
Towers. But again, the analysis there is steeped in his reading of Bataille
and Mauss, the gift, the symbolic, exchange. The so-called third world does not
hate the West for what it took (the standard leftist understanding of core
periphery relations since long before Wallerstein), they hate us for what we
gave, never stopping to ask if it was wanted. Isn’t this precisely what aboriginal
movements have been telling us for decades? Perhaps Baudrillard is one of the
few listening. He has a deep respect for ancient and for aboriginal cultures –
for how they understand the world in very different, and often more powerful,
ways than the modern West.
Now,
if we look at Baudrillard’s books of the 1990s we see (with the Perfect Crime (1995), Paroxysm (1997), Impossible Exchange (1999), and the Vital Illusion (2000)), Baudrillard pushing his analysis as it had
developed from the 1970s and 1980s to places that may be brilliant but are not
surprising given his previous writings. I think the Perfect Crime and Impossible
Exchange are very important books as much as are the much more widely
discussed Symbolic Exchange and Death
(1976) and Simulacra and Simulation
(1981).
So
I do not think there has been any post 9/11 break in Baudrillard, but there has
been more interest in him because of his reply to 9/11. It is the world which has experienced a break
since 9/11 – Baudrillard remains Baudrillard – albeit an increasingly
fragmentary one as time goes by. If 9/11 has had an impact on Baudrillard it
has enabled him to return to some of his core ideas – none more important than
reversibility – and speak to the more thoughtful members of a new generation (a
generation judging by my contemporary theory students who greatly appreciate
his challenge and his use of theory as challenge). The world has spent the past
twenty years trying to catch up to Baudrillard as have some of his early
critics.
The Lucidity Pact (which will be out in English this November) gathers up Baudrillard’s thought on evil, symbolic exchange, and the violence of the Western system over the past twenty years. The current work develops out of his past thinking into an analysis of the fundamental conflict of our time: the West versus those indestructible singularities one of which is radical Islam. Of course, the Islamic terrorists do not make sense. How are you going to stop the Westernization of Islamic societies and cultures by blowing up trains in London or Madrid or knocking down skyscrapers in New York? But the modern state doesn’t make any sense either. Let’s look at America. It is a country with little history and one that quickly obliterates what history it has – the violence of its founding and westward expansion – the savage destruction of aboriginal cultures and later of settler cultures. The American government in Washington has been at war with small town America for over a century. Today it is joined by large companies and the victory is almost complete. Nowhere in the West is the carceral so present as in “the land of the free”.
This is little different from what has taken place in
other Western countries – France or Germany. What is interesting to me about
America is that America is a curious combination of manifest destiny and fear.
Britain is buoyed by a false optimism, which hides behind the “stiff upper
lip”. France worries incessantly about its lack of morale. Neither suffer from
fear as does America. In my view the American sense of manifest destiny and
foreign policy have long been driven by fear – today it seems their major
motivation. We should not underestimate the long-term impacts of 9/11. Fear is
a terrible motivator – it makes one focus on immediate advantage – governance
is about a country’s most advantageous advantage in the long run. Where has the focus on the short term led
America? It has led it into a war on terrorism it cannot win (what government
or military could?) and into a climate where the new symbol of the nation is
the Homeland Security Office’s multi-coloured terror alert chart![10]
Americans are losing the happiness of living – it is something they have
perhaps never valued as they should. This is one area where Canadians and
Americans are now remarkably similar. The Canadian unofficial motto has long
been “security without risk”. We are both middle class countries and the middle
class is currently trapped in a mass-mediated web of fear. As long as Canadians
and Americans value surveillance over privacy they will get the kind of
government they deserve.
On
my way home from Ireland last month I sat in Shannon airport watching over 200
U.S. soldiers boarding a plane. We were struck by how young these men were – 95%
between 18 and 25, and where were they going? To Kabul, to continue the
occupation of one of the poorest countries on earth. I was relieved for them at
least to learn they weren’t going to Iraq (but this week, already, some of them
have been sent home in body bags). Where do we find America? The occupation of
Afghanistan, an illegal war in Iraq, the international crime of Guantanamo Bay,
the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib brought to the world via the troops’ own
cameras, the erosion of hard won civil liberties in the US, the Patriot Act,
etc. etc. And the President tells Americans that America is winning the war on
terror! One wonders what losing it would look like as one ponders the plummet
of Bush’s approval ratings. Further we have the trite reasoning on good’s
ability to triumph over evil, Alan Dershowitz’s pathetic statements on “legal
torture”, Michael Ignatieff’s very loyal The
Lesser Evil, – it is all quite embarrassing as Baudrillard’s assessment of
evil[11]
makes abundantly clear.
Today
Baudrillard stands for the non-fundamentalist position as he has for over two
decades. Perhaps this is why students of contemporary theory find him so useful
today – he makes a space for the non-believer. In an age rapidly becoming
characterized as fundamentalist (be it Muslim, Christian, or the fundamentalist
integrists of corporate globalization), it is very important to have things in
which not to believe – a
non-fundamentalist position. I am not sure Baudrillard has a more important
lesson than that for the “information age”. He helps us to broaden the dialogue
on terrorism and points to a space for those who do not wish to follow either
bin Laden or Bush.
NRIII: Hardt and Negri offer a “multitudinous” Marxism, but after Baudrillard, is a critical theory of Marxism possible?
GC: Yes, in the transpolitical, politics goes on as
well or better than before – and there is no reason to exclude Marxism from
this even if almost no one really believes in it anymore. In the transeconomic,
capital similarly proliferates and circles the globe via satellite even though
almost no one believes in it anymore. There is always a place for nostalgia and
to be a Marxist today is to live in nostalgia. I like to compare it to the
descendants of the old European aristocracy who dress up in 18th
century garb and pledge allegiance to the descendants of the Bourbons.
Empire, and especially Multitude, as
books, do not work – they tumble into their own discourse and become lost –
nobody knows what they mean. This will guarantee them at least a twenty-year
shelf life in academe – a publishers dream!
Aside from this, Hardt and Negri’s beautiful failure provides the
valuable service of showing us that the left and right are, as usual, quite close
together and deeply in need of one another. Hardt and Negri possess a faith in
humanity that I do not share – nonsensical passages about the ending of
conflict over resources and viewing such conflict as “increasingly unnatural”[12] – what does one say to that? The world is
full of people with good ideas (which end up causing a lot of evil) and I
suppose we can be impressed that human history has not been more bloody than it
has. But there is no reason to believe that it will not remain bloody.
Multitude has two meanings – the optimistic tone of Hardt and Negri and the one
we develop with a cool eye on life and death and human history. This later
view, which I am partial to, is rather more skeptical of multitudes. Multitude
makes me think of Youth in Seattle and it also makes me think of Rwandan
Genocide. History is a river always overflowing its banks.
The
twenty-first century will be a rather bad time for the multitude I am afraid,
not unlike the twentieth. Population escalation, resource declination, climate
change, biotechnology. I would predict a much smaller global population, much
more rigidly surveilled and controlled by the 24th century – and I
cannot imagine a “pretty” path there. Star Trek and its Federation of peace
loving Planets made good escapist science fiction for a century everyone wanted
out of. By the 24th century they will look back on how good we had
it. They will of course be taught to revile us – Star Trek got that right at
least. Maybe America will have even won its war on terrorism by then which of
course would mean the establishment of an absolute form of total control the
likes of which even Hitler could not achieve – there were constant acts of
terror against the Third Reich from within by German resistors. It makes one
think seriously about just what kind of state would be capable of ending terrorism and what would it look like?
Hardt
and Negri understand that everyone wants to live in a better world but no one
knows how to build it – the concepts they devise are interesting to a wide
audience – “multitude” as a concept is poetic, beautiful (the essence of the
poetic is often the impossible). I do not doubt the sincerity of Hardt and
Negri or their followers. Multitude, as a term, also speaks to me of the
restrictions of the social, global surveillance, one roots for the computer
virus! For me I suggest to students that they temper the reading of Empire and Multitude with The Mirror of
Production.[13]
NRIII: Is there a political Baudrillard?
GC: You will have to ask him. For me, the
transpolitical he has described means traditional political categories are of
no use to us anymore. Baudrillard has been accused of being right wing – but
only by those who have read him at the most facile level or, those who are so
deeply immersed in a moral crusade that anyone not so involved is immediately
labeled right wing (an unfortunate way the contemporary left mirrors George
Bush). Baudrillard says he wants to become the Rushdie of the left. But for me,
he is neither right nor left and has never occupied the centre. These old
political locations no longer exist in the transpolitical. Like all of us he
longs for meaning, a cause to attach oneself to, but there are none. Micro
political issues still exist and Baudrillard still becomes involved in them in
Paris.
Baudrillard
is in challenge – he has one strategy he says, that is all – so like Kristeva –
a process of constant revolt – theory as challenge. Such uncertainty as we face
is quite intolerable, but so human. I
think one of the most important things Baudrillard alerts us to is that there
is one thing worse than living in uncertainty: living in a world where there is
none – where everything is mapped, modeled, predictable and planned – a world
without computer viruses, disease, terrorism: without evil. All these things
are protecting us from something worse – total consensus – unless that is what
we are secretly dreaming of? We do keep telling pollsters that security is more
important than privacy. Yet, I am happy to report that I saw a poll on the web
last week telling its readers that 70 percent of those polled reported lying to
pollsters.
NRIII: There are the “names” of theory (e.g. Baudrillard,
Derrida, Foucault, etc.)…what can become of theory, now, that so much had come
true, or as Baudrillard has said, history has not ended, but rather, has become
recyclable?
GC: Time’s arrow does seem to be flying backwards just
now. Theory can only exist as challenge, anything else is quickly consumed with
banality. Theory is a space that stands in for liberty and authenticity in an
epoch that recognizes neither. Who is freer than Baudrillard? Nietzsche may
have come close. These two understood what it meant to write with a joyful
wisdom. Baudrillard’s Cool Memories diaries
are full of a beautiful poetic melancholy – melancholy allows one to hope for
the best yet expect the worst and still find a way of living with either and
both. In the end Baudrillard is not melancholic – but he works melancholy like
no one I’ve ever known.
NRIII: What is in the future for IJBS?
GC: It’s destiny. A suspicion of culture. A place for
very well established and not at all established writers on Baudrillard. A lot
of hard work and a good deal of joy. We’ll continue to try to make the world a
little more enigmatic and unintelligible. Maybe we will encourage some students
to ask why they have been so well protected from Baudrillard? The world is a
game and IJBS is a great toy – I
enjoy nothing more than play – very serious play.
an international and interdisciplinary journal
of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 2, September 2005, ISSN
1552-5112