Ideology and Interpellation by Jonathan Fardy;

Author:Jonathan Fardy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

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Baudrillard

Despite his catchphrase—history is a process without a subject—Althusser’s theory of ideology theorizes that the subject is always-already hailed. The question is: what kind of subjects will be recruited? Everything turns on winning the subject position of the hailing, the position of authority; in other words, everything depends on the struggle to win the subject position of the State. Althusserian ideological theory is itself subject to or subordinated to the logic of the subject, desire, and subjugation. In this respect, it arguably reproduces the very ideology that it critiques. How to break this spiral? This is Baudrillard’s question. Baudrillard turns to the object and to a form of theory that I call objectal so as to differentiate it from “objectivity.”

Precession of the Object

Baudrillard distinguishes between representation and simulation. The two concepts are for Baudrillard opposed. Representation “starts from the principle that the sign and the real are equivalent,” writes Baudrillard, “even if this equivalence is utopian, it is a fundamental axiom.”1 “Conversely, simulation,” Baudrillard continues, “starts from the utopia of this principle of equivalence.”2 Representation as concept is based on a principle of equivalence—utopian at its best—that nonetheless recognizes the discrepancy between sign and real. Simulation by contrast proffers a utopian vision of the unification of sign and real. Disneyland is one of Baudrillard’s favorite examples.

Disneyland is not an equivalent representation of something else. It presents itself as a utopia—a no-place—where Disney’s imagery and imaginary are realized. “Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation,” writes Baudrillard, “simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum.”3 Representation is premised on the idea of re-presentation whereas simulation simulates representation itself and thereby splits representation off from the semblance of reference.

Representation is bound up with the dialectic of reflection as either faithful reflection of reality or perverse ruse that masks reality. Simulation is altogether different for “it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.”4

Ideological critique in its traditional form is bound to the concept of reflection. False consciousness, for example, presupposes that a true consciousness would reflect reality as it truly is. But in simulacral societies reality has become “hyperreal”: a condition in which the line between image and the real is obscured. Baudrillard appropriated the term “hyperreal” from the artworld. In the late 1960s and 1970s artists such as Richard Estes refounded representational painting by making paintings based on photographs. Estes’s best-known works look like photographs—representations of images—but the worlds they represent are amalgams of multiple photographs. His paintings are simulations of places that do not exist anywhere. And yet this example is at best flawed. Hyperrealist painting “is not theoretically the essence of this [simulacral] form,” writes Mike Gane in his invaluable study, “it is but its flawed ironic duplication, since there is still the artist’s signature and the ‘border that separates’ the painted surface of the work of art and the wall of the gallery.”5 Hyperreal societies produce a “kind of fusion of real and imaginary,” writes

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