On a Thursday afternoon last year I sat in a dimly lit and sparsely populated auditorium at the Université de Québec à Montréal, listening to a handful of profs discuss terrorism in contemporary society.
While what the panelists discussed seemed interesting, I couldn’t help but watch something else. Across the hall, exactly one row in front of me, sat Jean Baudrillard.
I had expected that he would be wearing monotonal brown, as had been reported in one of the introductory texts on the man, but was surprised to see him in different shades of brown and a muted green tweed jacket-very professorial.
A few of the panelists had been discreetly introduced to him before retreating quickly back to the stage. But what was really surprising was the string of people, from undergrads to academic types, who had filed past him without the slightest look of recognition. No one in the room was looking towards him, no one whispering to the person beside them and pointing in his direction-just me. Yet the next night during Baudrillard’s keynote lecture, the same people who had walked by him heaped praises on him for his great intellectual insight.
Jean Baudrillard died last week after succumbing to a long illness. He was 77. He had written dozens of books, including Forget Foucault, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place and The Spirit of Terrorism. It was in that latter book, originally an essay, that he said “The collapse of the Twin Towers is unimaginable, but that’s not enough to make it a real event.”
His earlier scholarship focused on systems of value and exchange and remains largely underappreciated, while his more recent and better-known work tackled ideas of simulation, “simulacra” and reality.
He argued that “the hyper-real” was the world that we experienced through the media, and differentiates itself from what we experience through our physical senses. This theory was how he argued that the (first) Gulf War “did not happen.” Because our understanding of what took place in the southern deserts of Iraq was filtered to us through the media, and since nothing politically decisive took place, to Baudrillard, it became literally a non-event.
These concepts of his went on to inspire the movie The Matrix. In fact, when Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus welcomes Keanu Reeves’ Neo to “the desert of the real,” he’s quoting from Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation.
But it was his take on Sept. 11 that had brought him to the conference in Montreal. In a widely read essay he wrote after the attack that felled the World Trade Center towers, Baudrillard argued that what was happening was not, as many believed, a “clash of civilizations,” but the effect of media and consumer culture-or, as he put it “triumphant globalisation battling against itself.” Baudrillard saw globalization as a force throwing cultures together, with all their ambivalences and their antagonisms manifested in this new, media-filtered relationship.
While Baudrillard’s ideas and his texts will live on, I am grateful to have experienced the hyper-real of the man himself.
