The orgy of revolutions

THE sexual revolution of the past three decades has given rise to a number of interesting debates. It has championed the cause of the oppressed while challenging the establishment. But like any revolution, it is being achieved at a heavy cost of creating an emotional chasm between men and women as they struggle to come to grips with a new set of power relationships, based on equality and a radical approach to intimacy.

Within the cultural matrix of Europe, Baudrillard has radically redefined the way society views sex, sexuality and gender. Questioning the descriptions of sexual preference or cries of political protest within the lesgay subcultures, he challenges the current theories of sexual difference, employing a variety of theoretical approaches (psychoanalysis, deconstruction, semiotics and discourse theories) to investigate representation of sex and sexual difference in literature, film, video, music, art, photography.

Contemplating on the revolutions of the 1960s, Baudrillard in his recent book The Transparency of Evil feels that though it is often held that the sexual revolution in the last three decades has resulted in liberation, there is only a confused sense of the distinctions between the masculine and the feminine. The "androgynous and Frankensteinian appeal of a Michael Jackson" disturbs all classes of sexuality. He sees no reality other than the one thrown up by the system as its ideal reference. Disputing many of the dominant interpretations of the role of sexuality in modern culture, he sees the emergence of "plastic sexuality" - sexuality freed from its intrinsic relation to reproduction - and analyses it in terms of the long-term development of the modern social order and social influences of the last few decades.

To pick out the main argument of the book is not to do justice to it as a whole, and will not be attempted here. A stripped-down analysis of its general scheme cannot bring out its sheer imaginative sweep and the force of its intelligence. One of the leading and the most controversial thinkers writing today, his original and brilliant views on almost all aspects of life, matched by his stylistic virtuosity, destroy preconceived notions of approaching the question of reality. As in his other works such as In the Shadows of the Silent Majorities, Simulations and Simulacra, Fatal Strategies, Cool Memories, Baudrillard follows a certain active and methodical disorientation that reaffirms the necessity for a rigorous and generative review of the contemporary scene.

So respected is he in elite colleges both on the Continent and in the United States, that contemporary criticism has often applied his thinking to "the self-referential world of postmodernist art", in spite of his acknowledgement that there is no credible aesthetic analysis in his work and that art is dead. The revolution in art has engendered a "transaesthetic realm of indifference". Though art has proliferated in the modern world, it has disappeared as a symbolic pact, "as something thus clearly distinct from that pure and simple production of aesthetic values, that proliferation of signs ad infinitum, that recycling of past and present forms which we call culture." With fundamental rules of art missing, it becomes "a currency which may not be exchanged: it can only float its only reference itself, impossible to convert into real value or wealth". Paradoxically, behind the disordered compulsive movement of modern art lies a paralysis in which there are only repetitions at a faster pace, endless variations on forms gone by, a kind of anarchy within the cultureless West that is indicative of the collapse of the secret code of aesthetics.

The utopian aspect of art stands ignored as everyone turns into a creator, thanks to the media, computer science and video technology which flood the world with self-generating images, totally eclectic and superficial. We live in an age of general aestheticisation when all forms of culture and anti-culture are encouraged and promoted. The world's "insignificance has been transfigured by the aestheticising process" and with the "materialisation" of aesthetics, art is slowly disappearing, giving place to advertising, bringing us to a juncture when it is pointless to give art any aesthetic consistency. With a dizzying eclecticism of forms comes a dizzying desire for pleasure. More and more images are created but in this profusion of images there is nothing to see. The aesthetic syntax disappears in the negative intensity of images that are inconsequential and have no form. Are we, therefore, returning to the anthropological without any reference to the aesthetic standards? In one of his very cool and apoclyptic statements, Baudrillard gives the sensational message that "we have returned to the cultural stage of primitive societies". Similarly Nietzsche argues in Beyond Good and Evil that it is not a question of halting the wheel of History; but if History is really a "wheel and if modern nihilism can be compared to Christianity, if the modern world is a repetition of the Roman world, then... after the triumph of the 'new Christianity' there will be a return to the Middle Ages".

Within this culture of the hyperreal, lives are constituted by images and symbols which have no reference to any concrete object or individual identity. Having a country breakfast on Oxford Street is the distant imitation of a lost and often already counterfeit reality, which Baudrillard calls "gigantic simulacrum" or an "age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any god to recognise his own, nor any last judgement to separate truth from false, the real from its artificial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance". Where there is no depth of meaning, there can be no reality. "More-real-than-real simulations", a kind of a Disneyland - such is the present beguiling world even as it exercises a surreptitious repression:

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real... It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.

"All the great humanist criteria of value", Baudrillard reiterates, "all the values of a civilisation of moral, aesthetic, and practical judgement, vanish in our system of images and signs". Within any interrogation and rethinking of contemporary critical sense it must be kept in mind that the external symbols of our world cannot be held responsible for evolving the way they have. If they are weak or trivial or absurd, they speak less for themselves and more about our inner lives. As Angela Carter in The Passion of New Eve rightly says, "A critique of these symbols is a critique of our lives".

Disordered details and vertiginous experience of the baroque are the symptoms of a dying rationalism, a fundamental break from the recent past, "once presented as the unique, progressive and symmetrical appropriation of reality". This confusion of connections, this disjunction is apparent in the opaque languages of critical writing. The problematisation of reality within the debate over postmodernism involves a look at the Marxist critique of reality, at Nietzsche's critique of analytical enquiry and the Freudian interrogations of immediate appearances and the reality behind them. But behind the mask is there a transcendental reality? Our symbols, our fictional stories, our language, our differences, our dialogue become what Derrida defines the factor of truth.

SHELLEY WALIA

The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, Jean Baudrillard, London: Verso, p.174, £34.95 (hardcover).

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