The Brotherwise Dispatch, VOL.2, ISSUE#2, MARCH-MAY/2010
Francois L’Yvonnet – You actually seem to be quite a solitary person. Though you’ve been part of various intellectual movements and close to some groups, you’ve never had any affiliations to any of them, even the Situationist International.
Jean Baudrillard – I referred to the Situationists, but never in my writings or analyses. I spoke about them, in my lectures at Nanterre, for example. How could you not speak about them? And then, we were very close, but I never had any direct personal relations with their leaders. I knew Raoul Vaneigem a little, but I never met Guy Debord.
FL – A solitude which brought you some unkind remarks from the S.I. In the groups journal you even came in for an attack, alongside Henri Lefebvre, in articles full of name-calling. Doubtless you were paying a price for your marginality. It has to be said the Situationists had a rather curious way of referring to people.
JB – Their attacks were aimed mainly at Henri Lefebvre, and there were undoubtedly some real issues between them. After the Father, they took against the false sons, one of whom was me. They stigmatized me as the house Maoist, all because Felix Guattari and I and few others had set up what I think was called the Franco-Chinese People’s Association, with a newspaper.
FL – When was this?
JB – At the time of the Cultural Revolution, in the early sixties. Felix had connections with a very committed bookshop based near the Paris Mosque, and we became quite close friends. It was his idea to found this association. We published a newspaper, the title of which I forget. It ran only two or three issues, no more than that, because the Chinese never recognized us. One of us even went to Algiers to meet Chou En-Lai, but he didn’t want anything to do with us. The Chinese preferred upstanding, law-abiding right-wing associations, not an uncontrollable little far-left group! Others went to Geneva, also to meet with officials from the People’s Republic, but they had no more success. We organized a big meeting at the Salle de Horticultures that ended in violence, with OAS heavies moving in to break it up using strong-arm tactics. Having no ideological baggage and not belonging to any political organization, I was just the right man to edit a paper like that! I was a bit of a front-man. The venture didn’t go any further and the paper disappeared. I have happy memories of it, though it was more or less historically stillborn. It’s a great story from the wild years!
FL – Was that your last episode as an activist?
JB – Activist is going a bit far. I’ve never been any kind of activist.
FL – In Henri Lefebvre, it wasn’t so much the one-time Communist that interested you, the witness to the ideological conflicts of the past, as the theorist of everyday life.
JB – It was, certainly, the critique of everyday life that interested me. I never really took my lead from Lefebvre’s work. I found what he did quite free-spirited, light and wittily written, but it seemed to me already to belong to another age, an age still closed to psychoanalysis and semiology. He wouldn’t have anything to do with any of that. Structuralism was his number one enemy. And what I was doing didn’t quite fit in with his own work, but we remained very good friends. When I arrived at Nanterre University in 1966-7, Lefebvre had just broken with the Situationists at the famous Strasbourg Congress.
FL – Let’s recall what that was about: in 1965, Debord broke with Lefebvre, whom he regarded as too abstract and philosophical, arguing that his book La Proclamation de la Commune(1965) had plagiarized a Situationist pamphlet.
JB – There were points on which we were ideologically in disagreement with the Siutationists. For example, ‘workers’ councils’ and the councils movement as a whole seemed very dated to us. On the other hand, their radicalism interested me, and everyone went along with their idea of radical subjectivity! In the end, all these things remained in the imaginary register, the political imagination. It was a phenomenon which quite rightly disappeared. That was all it could do. And those who criticize the Situationists for not having succeeded are barking up the wrong tree, since Situationism wasn’t made to succeed! Today, they’re reviving its ghost again, with Debord.
FL – In Situationism, there’s both an innovative, ludic thinking and, at the same time, an incredibly classical rhetoric, with ponderous theoretical demonstrations of papal seriousness, equipped with a conceptual apparatus taken directly from German philosophy – demonstrations which fascinated them. They were still in dissertation mode. Your won way of thinking and writing breaks unequivocally with all that.
JB – They had a great force of conviction and the desire to be clear. This was the last form in which an avant-garde phenomenon of this kind appeared, though the term ‘avant-garde’ isn’t appropriate – at any rate, a movement with such a ‘pointed’ critique. It was the end of a kind of revolutionary idealism, which had moved on to new ground such as daily life, the city, etc. Thanks to them, all the Marxists superstructures were greatly weakened, even if they did remain attached to old ways of thinking. All that blew away after 1970 with all the business about desire and revolution and the mixing of the two . . .
FL – Freudo-Marxism . . .
JB – Some saw an extreme radicalism in that. But the mix sounded the death-knell of both desire and revolution. The blending of the two led to each being neutralized by the other. There were many who based themselves on the idea for a long time. As far as the question of desire was concerned, I already had some marked disagreements with Jean-Francois Lyotard, and even with Gilles Deleuze . . . while entirely admiring their ‘machine’, which was very desirable, but from my point of view not really operative! A whole generation based themselves on this terrible ambiguity, on things that had, to all intents and purposes, already disappeared.
FL – What makes desire and revolution irreconcilable?
JB – The political and libidinal dimensions lose their singularity. It was their singularity alone that gave them their force. To mix the two was to contravene their irreducibility. It was, when all’s said and done, one hell of a misappropriation of Marx and Freud.
FL – Which led to neutralizing the subversive dimensions of each man’s thought?
JB – There was a kind of outpouring of the one into the other, with a total loss of intensity, to sue the terms then in vogue. It would be stupid to make pejorative analysis of this retrospectively. At the time everyone dived in, including the best minds, but, with some distance, we have to agree it was a trap, and a trap that still operates more or less everywhere today. Like the revolt of the Situationists, these ideas serve as a reference today for what I won’t call the most impoverished thinking, but at least the most conventional.
FL – We need only think of those who claim to be the heirs apparent to the Situationists today – real embezzlers of the heritage!
JB – Let’s not talk about them.
FL – And poor old Debord, who will soon be included in the school textbooks! Isn’t it always a bit suspicious for an author to be a classic so easily?
JB – You can admire Debord’s language, but that’s to make an aesthetic object out of it, which wasn’t the case. Form is always important, but his language wasn’t an object of admiration in itself. The same thing happened when they began to analyse the thought of Freud and Marx from the ideological, emotional or even the everyday standpoint, talking about their maids and I don’t know what else. To sexualize Marx and to politicize Freud was a thoroughly dubious mix. This kind of mishmash or patchwork has become the vulgate today. Among the sensible critiques of Debord, one of the most pertinent came from Regis Debray. In an article which appeared, I think, in Le Debat, while also settling some old personal scores, he said some very apposite things about alienation, man’s separation from himself. He pointed out that we weren’t in that ball-game at all now; on the contrary, we’re threatened not by separation or alienation, but by total immersion.
FL – The language of the Situationists bears the hallmarks of German idealism with the notions of alienation, objectification, reification.
JB – I remember Situationism as something really admirable, but it’s an extinct phenomenon, a dead star. Which isn’t the case with Nietzsche or some others. The Situationists were like meteors, and I wouldn’t want publicly to dissociate myself with them, since, in terms of events, it was an important moment. It’s in the moment when things appear that their essentials are revealed.
FL – It’s in their nascent state that we should attempt to grasp movements of thought. When they have matured, they often cease to be fertile and stiffen for a last dogmatic burst before their inevitable decline.
JB – In 1966-7, with the journal Utopie, we created our own little domain. We developed some major objections to Situationist thinking. We went further beyond politics and ideology than they were – beyond alienation.
FL – Utopie also broke the ‘Bolshevik’ arrogance of the Situationists, their anathemas, their impoverished tribunals, their condemnations of all kinds, which ended up occupying most of their mental and militant energies. With a clear ‘schoolboy’ dimension evident in their wordplay.
JB – You’re right. There was something adolescent in that revolt. For me, Utopie was the preparatory phase for my work on objects, on the consumer society and political economy. The Mirror of Production was the break with Marx, with the emergence of symbolic exchange in prospect. It was that thinking that went into Utopie. We were already in the transpolitical.
this interview is excerpted from Jean Baudrillard, Fragments: Conversations with Francois L’Yvonnet, (London, Routledge, 2001, 2004) pp.15-20.
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