Page 186 - Cultural Theory

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••• Speculation to the Death •••

and, he adds, may even be using technology today as the scene of its appearance.
Moving from a pessimistic, Heideggerian critique of the fate of the real under tech-
nology Baudrillard now asks, therefore, whether the world might not be using tech-
nology as a means of preserving or even of showing its radical illusion (1995b: 85;
Zurbrugg, 1997: 38). Alongside radical physics and cosmology, therefore (1996b), and
building on his earlier analyses of the object (1990c; 1993c: 172–4), Baudrillard
increasingly emphasizes in both his personal practice and Barthes-inspired (Barthes,
1993) reflections on photography (Zurbrugg, 1997; Baudrillard, 1996b: 85–9; 1998b:
89–101; 1999; 2001c: 139–47) its possibilities as a technological medium as a route
to the symbolic. Against the contemporary ‘automatic proliferation’, and ‘forced sig-
nification’ and ‘prostitution’ of images (1999: 151, 148, 139; see Barthes, 1993:
117–19), comes the possibility of photography ‘wresting a few exceptional images’
(1999: 145) which, in their surprise, stillness and suspense, both capture the light of
the object and are ‘seized’ by it (ibid.: 145–6), offering an experience of the world in
its otherness and ‘non-objectivity’ (2001c: 139). Oddly, therefore, it is in the objec-
tive lens of human technology that Baudrillard discovers the hope of moving beyond
the subject and its entire representational metaphysics and resulting production
and extermination of the real, for another mode of experience, another – symbolic-
relationship to the world.

‘To Think Extreme Phenomena …’

To think extreme phenomena, thought must itself become an extreme
phenomenon.
(1996b: 66)

As Mike Gane has said, ‘no-one as yet, really knows how to read Baudrillard’
(Critchley, 1999). If, therefore, most of his critics have yet to hit him, as most ‘launch
their derision too soon, and miss the target’ (Gane, 1995: 120), it must equally be rec-
ognized that he has also so far eluded most of his more sympathetic commentators:
Baudrillard is never quite where you believe him to be and always more than you
think. Baudrillard himself has commented on the ‘reductive’ criticism he has often
received (Zurbrugg, 1997: 45), but even positive attempts to explain his work to a
wider audience risk a reductive selection and interpretation, in merely producing
another simulacrum of his work. If an introduction such as this cannot, therefore,
offer the Baudrillard, it aims at least to offer a way to approach Baudrillard, a frame-
work within which to begin to read him, and, hopefully, a basis upon which to sur-
pass it, to move closer to what he himself might be.
There is much to be gained from this: even taking his work, as I have, as a critical
analysis of contemporary society, its relevance is obvious. Baudrillard provides many
brilliant examples and, although space prevents the use of others here, clearly many
of his ideas remain instantly recognizable to us and can easily be applied to our

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