Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) was a French philosopher whose work has found a new relevance today. He died before the financial crash of 2008 and before the covid-19 pandemic, yet his particular vision of a world punctuated by these kinds of crisis continues to be illuminating. In this new book by Kline and Holland it is this particular reading of the crisis of culture in the Western world as it concerns education which is in focus. There are thus two elements here, first Baudrillard’s own general theory of this crisis, and secondly Baudrillard’s relevance to method and practice. In both of these aspects of his writings and activities Baudrillard radically reverses many deeply and closely held basic assumptions of educationalists.
The first reversal concerns the crisis itself: for example the world seems no longer to be one that is under human control (if it ever was), but a world that is de-regulated in all major aspects. Baudrillard explores this de-regulation in surprising analyses of post-modern forms of virtuality from Disneyfication to computer generated imagery as a basic problem of how to think the very basic term: reality as it too becomes de-regulated. His analyses of hyperreality, virtual reality, and absolute reality have been widely influential. The first reversal is to think through the proposition that the dialectical world of counter-balances has been superseded by one that had gone to extreme logics in every domain as an effect of the sovereignty of the object. And these logics now have to be considered as challenges threatening the very existence of humanity itself.
A second reversal concerns modern technology, particularly communication and media technology. Very simply it can be asked whether this is an extension of the human organism, a system of tools employed to carry out tasks defined by the human subject, or whether these technologies hijack these projects and hold them hostage. Baudrillard’s approach here is to suggest that the logic of these technologies is one that goes towards an extreme, the complex process of exclusion of the human. The question thus reposed is: what is the new relation between the human and the inhuman in a modern world dominated by sophisticated communication technologies? It could certainly be argued that modern educational systems have been revolutionised by these technologies over the last fifty years and that these now hold the practices of education in hostage. The traditional practices of human contact and oral transmission of cultures have been replaced gradually by a pervasive virtualisation through television, computer, smartphone. What has happened is a unification of media: phone, radio, television, typewriter, and camera. And the consequence is the world is now instantaneously both more real and more virtual. Instead of an alienation effect here, Baudrillard argues, the new problem is absorption and immersion, and the loss of critical distance.
As the authors of this new book argue Baudrillard does not suggest the solution to these problems lies in a return to a promethean vision, to the sovereignty of the subject, to a new mode of production. His writings call for a re-evaluation of issues around symbolic cultural forms and a new relation to the object for those able to place themselves in symbolic exile from the new machine, call taken up by Kline and Holland in a fine lucid exploration and discussion.
Mike Gane
Emeritus Professor of Sociology
Loughborough University
August 22, 2020