PoMo to Go
Pomo To Go --Wired 2.06, June 1994
A User's Guide to Trendy French Intellectuals
By R.U. Sirius, 1994
Pol Pot was educated in Paris. Years later, back home in Cambodia, he
ordered his Khmer Rouge to execute all people with glasses -- part of his
war against intellectualism. Was Pol Pot's hostility displaced? Or was it a
perverted irritation, shared by so many, with the convoluted thought
processes and obfuscatory language peculiar to French intellectuals? The latter seems, at least, a good guess.
Don't get me wrong. I have a soft spot for French writers. Back in my
college days, I would argue with the fans of the Spanish-language
surrealists like Federico Garcia Lorca and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Sure,
the Latins were deeper, more subtle, better writers. But those original
Dada guys, Breton and Tzara -- blithely tossing firecrackers of dense
language, contradictory words striking against one another in paroxysms of
pleasurable non sense -- now that's what I call an afternoon's fun.
The legacy of torturous French writing certainly predates the likes of de
Sade. Indeed, we can trace that French quality of huffiness all the way
back to Voltaire. Or take Sartre, please. Only a Frenchman could come up
with a philosophy of complete individual freedom and responsibility and
use it to justify Maoism. (American college students in the 1960s don't
really count in this regard. We're talking elegantly phrased philosophy
here, not youthful rituals of self-righteousness.) I don't know whether
Pol Pot shared vin et fromage with the nauseous one, or if he preferred the
more violent thinker, M. Jean Genet.
But this is all old news. The big names now are Bataille, Deleuze, Derrida,
and Baudrillard: the fab four of postmodernism. Generally, the French pomo
thinkers succeed at two things: They offer a hysterical (read paranoid) but
insightful perspective on the cruel and schizophrenic nature of late 20th
century techno-culture, and they engage in linguistic sophistry to try to
save Marxism's irrelevant ass. Trendy French thinkers deal with language
and reality in techno-terms; in other words, they view it all as a big
machine or a complex system. And they therefore exert great influence on the cybercrit (genus academia) segment of cyberculture.
Reading any of these guys is exhausting, and it takes valuable time away
from watching television advertising, which generally communicates the pomo
experience with that American kind of immediacy that we all crave -- even
when it's on behalf of Trendy French Perfumes. This is why I'm providing
you with this handy guide to Trendy French Intellectuals. Quicker and
easier even than Monarch Notes, this guide will give you enough information
to banter in hip academic circles and, believe me, quoting Lacan can get you laid.
Let's start with some historically influential French thinkers. You need to
know them because even though they are not directly related to the
philosophies of postmodern discourse, they influenced the guys in the
latter half of this guide -- the really trendy ones.
Voltaire
Voltaire was the icon-at-large and philosopher-punk of the Age of Reason.
He's best known for his tale Candide, which expressed his contempt for
those among his contemporaries who denied the existence of evil. Voltaire
was an original flamer, creating that top note of bitchiness without which
the arrogance of French philosophy would have been impossible. He offended
so many people during his career that many were surprised he died of
natural causes, in old age.
De Sade
Working from his first-hand experience of the French aristocracy and the
French Revolution, the Marquis de Sade used dense and darkly beautiful language, heavy with irony and sexual reference, to express his conviction that life was absurd. He spent 27 years in various states of imprisonment and detention in French prisons and castles as a result. He is, along with Lucifer and Aleister Crowley, one of the West's most mythic Bad Boys.
Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, and les Symbolistes
The French Symbolists of the 19th century took the "elegantly wasted" decadence of British fops like Coleridge and supplemented it with the language of romantic hysteria. The speed and jumpiness of these poets
predates and predicts the cut-ups of William S. Burroughs and the dense
language of Spasm culture a la Arthur Kroker. Rimbaud's oft-quoted "intentional disordering of the senses" inspired the likes of Keith Richards and Patti Smith in more modern times. Today, after the H-bomb, LSD, MTV, and VR, we find even the most poetic among postmodern youth longing for a reordering of the senses. Ain't gonna happen, son.
Tzara and Breton
These two were among those who created the Dadaist and Surrealist
movements. The Dadaists were this century's original media jammers,
specializing in public acts of irrationality, scandal, and confusion.
Dadaism eventually became Surrealism. The Surrealists agreed with Freud
that human consciousness, like an iceberg, lies mostly invisible beneath
the surface. Surrealism attempted to explore the hidden areas of human
consciousness through strange juxtapositions of words and images. As such,
Surrealism is a favorite reference point for both the psychedelic and
multimedia cultures.
Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp -- inventor of modern appropriation in the form of the
ready-made -- changed the way the West sees art by showing that art is more
likely to come from the eye of the artist than from the artist's hands. In
other words, he demonstrated that artistic vision is more important than
technical mastery. An elegant and quiet man, Duchamp is now honored in the
art world, referenced by appropriationist collage artists like Negativland
and John Oswald and blamed for Jeff Koons.
Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre was an existentialist. That means that he took atheism
seriously. Atheism implies that there are no divine laws. If there are no
divine laws then what you do is totally up to you and your desires and
needs. Conversely, whatever happens to you is totally your own problem:
The consequences of your choices are your personal responsibility. Somehow,
in spite of this, he positioned himself 180 degrees to the left of Ayn Rand
and Nietzsche. Imagine yourself dead. Your consciousness is completely
annihilated, you have ceased to exist and you will never ever exist again.
This is death as the existentialist imagines it. Enjoy!
Genet
Georges Bataille said of Jean Genet that he "chose to explore Evil as
others have chosen to explore Good." Jean-Paul Sartre saw Genet as a saint.
His romanticized view of the thief and the criminal was Americanized by
Norman Mailer in the seminal 1950s beat-attitude essay, The White Negro, and may have ultimately led to a culture of Oliver North and Snoop Doggy
Dogg. I leave it to you to fill in the blanks.
Debord and the Situationists
Guy Debord was the spokesperson for the Situationists International, social
critics who, in the 1960s, were the first to suggest that image was the
real commodity in our society and that image would replace more traditional
goods in the economy of the future. To understand image as commodity, just
consider the entire world of television -- from the advertisers conflating
their every product with sex, to the stars, their PR firms, and the gossip
industry that makes them who we think they are. Also consider the consumer
of television images and what he or she is purchasing from the couch. The
Situationist concept of the "society of the spectacle" -- in which living
is replaced by viewing -- maps perfectly to our culture of virtuality. The
Situationists might be considered partly responsible for the smug
superiority and intolerance of today's politically correct.
Bataille
Georges Bataille was a French novelist and critic whose ideas very much
influenced postmodern thinking about sexual politics and eroticism. In one
of his most interesting collections of essays, Literature and Evil,
Bataille argues for the primacy of what he calls "powerful communication,"
which he defines as privileged moments of supreme awareness based on
emotions of sensuality, drama, love, separation, and death. In short,
Bataille makes explicit the French intellectual's partly repressed
tendency to be a drama queen.
Barthes
Roland Barthes's early work suggests that literature, in the traditional
sense of the word, used language in the service of class divisions. (There.
I just saved you from reading a few million words, most of them
adjectives.) But the idea that traditional language excludes the exploited
classes has unfortunately led to the attempt to alter language by foisting
incomprehensible replacements on college students. Barthes also felt that
authentic modernist literature would have to testify to its own
ideological guilt. His point of view was well articulated by Bataille when
he said, "Literature is not innocent." This was adopted by Sex Pistols's
memetician Malcolm McLaren as "No one is innocent." You will note that M.
Barthes didn't volunteer his own guilty ass for imprisonment or execution.
Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard is a social theorist who has made his living explaining
the emergence of mass culture and the increasing importance of social
images as commodities -- very much in the vein of the Situationists. To get
a feel for the Baudrillardian "social-image-as-a-commodity," consider the
term "spin doctor," listen to Michael Jackson's lawyers, or examine the
difference between a television commercial and a PBS "pledge break."
Baudrillard talks about the regression of simulacra, the media hall-of-
mirrors in which any reference to the actual disappears. Mick Jagger talked
about the same thing 20 years ago in the film Performance, only he was in a
bubble bath with the still-attractive Anita Pallenberg and an underage
androgynous French Girl. Baudrillard isn't that much fun, though he's the
most popular Trendy Frenchman with the college crowd. [...]
Deleuze and Guattari
In their ongoing attack on the theories of Freud, Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari have proposed something called "schizoanalysis" as an alternative
to psychoanalytic practice. They said, "A schizophrenic going for a walk is
healthier than a neurotic on a couch," a philosophy that we find in
practice on the streets of Berkeley, California. Scholars influenced by
these two have recently raised the banner of cyberpunk science fiction,
since the genre speaks directly to the schizoid character of techno/media
life.
Derrida
Jacques Derrida is a philosopher concerned with the act of reading. He
imagines the scholar as a kind of priest and sees criticism and analysis as
religious ritual performed upon a text. This makes Derrida very popular
among academics, who would otherwise feel completely irrelevant in our
media apocalypse. Recently, even academics have described Derrida's
thinking as out of date. Derrida's progeny however, such as the brilliant
Avital Ronell, have made it their business to read technology and the
meaning of techno-culture. The results are overwrought ... but amusing.
Foucault
Michel Foucault explored and analyzed the political and bureaucratic
aspects of control and punishment. He was among the first to recognize and
define our emerging technocratic surveillance culture in terms of the
"panopticon," a multitiered prison complex in which all activity is
visible to the overseers. Poor Michel. He didn't know about anonymous remailers. [...]
Kristeva
Julia Kristeva explores the place of the female in the patriarchy, or
dominant social order. Like the American novelist Kathy Acker, she
questions the whole idea of identity and asserts that the feminine has been
marginalized and identified as Other. Other(ness) is a major buzzword in
pomo feminist and minority discourse these days. For instance, female
sexuality, in Western European culture, is frequently portrayed as a
mysterious commodity with an aura that can be easily transferred to an
artifact and purchased by the consumer. Americans have vulgarized this
exotic romanticism to the point of unintentional parody by associating, for
instance, bad beer with buxom bimbos. The only mystery, finally, is how
anyone can be that stupid. [...]
Lyotard [...]
Jean Francois Lyotard looks at what he calls "narrative," the idea that
through language we tell ourselves stories about life, stories that have an
internal logic and structure. He compares this with scientific language,
which sees itself as superior to narrative language because it requires
"scientific proof." Lyotard shows how scientific language eventually
becomes a self-validating narrative itself through philosophical and
political consensus. Science tells itself that scientific thought will
ultimately end in the emancipation of humanity through Progress. This,
according to Lyotard, is a crock of shit.
Jacques Lacan did for philosophy and language what The Residents did for
music. The Residents placed a high value on obscurity. Lacan placed a high
value on the difficulty people had understanding his language. If you're
unfamiliar with The Residents, then this may be a Lacanian discourse of
sorts. Lacan said things like "language points to a lack" which apparently
means that if you're talking about it, you're not getting any. And you
thought the French were always at it! Quoting Lacan might score you the
most points in postmodern intellectual circles. The reason for this remains
-- of course -- obscure.
Final thought
It might be argued that, taken as a whole, the Trendy French Philosophers
have created a poetic and hyperbolic -- if convoluted -- rejection of late
20th-century capitalist techno-culture that offers little in the way of
hope for that culture's transformation or defeat. On the other hand, they
are sufficiently fascinated by that which they critique to pass long hours
in coffee houses, basking in their negation. As such, they serve as a
tremendous inspiration to America's techno-jaded slackers.
Copyright
© 1993-2002 The Condé Nast Publications Inc. All rights reserved.
R.U. Sirius (rusirius@well.com) is co-founder of MONDO 2000. He wrote this with the expert help of Carmen Hermosillo in June 1994, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.06/pomo_pr.html
Books
If you have read Mondo 2000 magazine before, then nothing in this book will be much of a surprise. In fact in 1998 this book is clearly retro. Still, to the new reader you will find much of the information interesting. The format is basically an A-Z of popular memes and cultural phenomena with a pseudo hypertext interface. High gloss and flashy. Suitable for a coffee table, but you might want to keep it on your reference shelf. Limited availability. Mentions Gilles Deleuze and Georges Bataille in its bibliography. Bataille in the 'meat' section.