The Decline of the Political at the hands of Art : Jean Baudrillard, Che Guevara and V for Vendetta

Russell Manning

In the beginning there wasn’t the word
A man went into a catholic bookstore in the city where this essay was written intent on buying a new crucifix. The salesperson brought out a tray of crucifixes ranging in size, price and design. After he deliberated for a while the salesperson asked him whether he wanted a plain one or one with a little man on it. In many ways this little man is the inspiration of this essay. Not a dissertation on Jesus Christ, or the loss of faith, but more so the loss of strong political effect amidst a sea of equivalence. In the salesperson’s eye the little man was an adornment, an aesthetic add on to the crucifix dependent on how you were accessorizing your ‘look’. What we want to do in this essay is to resuscitate the power of symbols (such as the little man) as a political intervention into this world of signs where the crucifix for some has become symbolically equivalent to a swatch watch. In a world of equivalence where the golden arches has as much social signification as the Nazi swastika something seems to be amiss. To accommodate this political revival we will theorize with and through the late French polemicist Jean Baudrillard. A complicated and challenging figure Baudrillard spends much of his writing life theorizing signs and their colonization by powerful forces external to but familiar to the social. Popular culture is named thus because it has mass appeal. However, in order for massification the popular must take hold of meaningful political signs and neutralize them, make them swim in a sea of equivalence. This was one of Baudrillard’s largest targets; the loss of meaning brought about by the market fiddling with the power and the effect of political signification.  As such we will not stray too far from popular culture as popular culture is where the mind of the masses is shaped. Therefore it is highly instructive in approaching the growing and alarming intersection of the market, art and politics. As we have seen in the above anecdote the ability to make a political statement, whether secular or religious has become increasingly difficult.

The (dying) System of (political) Objects
A short time ago we pointed our furniture at each other. In these times we arranged chairs around a table to maximize family communication. We talked. We ate together. (We often thanked the little man). Now the same furniture is pointed at the television and the eating arrangements of many families is constructed around a schedule which prohibits the communal sharing of food. Often our dining companion is a computer. Food has become fast. Life has become faster. Or so it seems.  Now in this lifeworld what place do we have for the political? Where do we fit the time to sit and talk about what is important, what grows out of or should we say down from the systematizers? Similarly we can ask what store we place on art and the aesthetic because, again, the creation of the aesthetic real is very dependent on the fabrication of the same market. For example, as we shall see Hollywood tends to overdetermine the real of film telling us that good films are the opens that make good box office returns. This definitely blurs the lines between art and the market and elevates films of questionable ethical dimensions¹.  What we are warning about is the dominant structuring principles of media technology that are mono-dimensional, passive and intellectually enervating.

One way to assess how this change has manifest is to attempt to theorize where we came from before so many screens appeared in our lives. By juxtaposing the past with the present a distinctive shift emerges. This shift is both how the little man becomes such and also explains in part the death of a time of a grander historical perspective. While Nietzsche told us God is dead for we have killed him² , what has taken the place of God and all its symbolic and historical certainty is not what Nietzsche envisioned. He believed in the emergence of a higher type of man full of passionate aesthetic capability. What we have got instead is an increasingly passionless subject devoid of a horizon of vision, unless we count the vision of the market. In Baudrillardian vocabulary what we had was signified by what he calls (among other signifiers) the ceremonial and the ritual³.  This could be seen where we came from. Consider, as an example, how as little as fifty years ago a man’s suit was cut from a narrow set of fashion design parameters. There was a predominantly homogenous look, and the codes and rules that stipulated this (Baudrillard’s ‘rituals’) were part of an identifiable ceremony of dressing. It wasn’t long, for a variety of reasons that the suit bloomed into a garment where the rules of wearing were liberated, so semblance of acknowledged ceremony and ritual were lost. This ‘system’ of fashion was liberated and through the 1960’s and seventies these codes, ceremonies and rituals and systems turned on themselves. They were constantly attacking the real for a new look. For Baudrillard, the most fundamental thing that happened was that the imaginary templates of these object that ruled over these ceremonies ‘withdrew’ and were replaced by objects with no original. Hence an object such as a suit had no original, but merely a copy of (present) self. The rules of fashion were lost, no classic design, but instead a constant challenge to the real of suit fashion. Baudrillard terms this ‘hyperreality’. What happens, in essence, is that in order to maintain sales, markets must make some consumable objects obsolete. In order to affect this it will inscribe new objects into the system of the real which at times may neutralize or condemn these rituals. A contemporary example of this is mobile telephone technology; with each new generation superseding its predecessor and ensuring that an atmosphere is created in which possession of the old technology seems not only redundant, but negative. New signifiers are instituted into play, consummated by terms such as ‘fashion victim’ or ‘fashion crime’. The real is thus adjusted to suit the whim of the systematizers.

This is one important way to understand the sociopolitical movements of the time. We attempted to liberate ourselves from restrictive ceremonials and rituals of the post second world war era by openly and deliberately opposing these ceremonies. For example the hippie movement of the 1960’s systematically tore down ceremonies and rituals in the name of free love and peace, but ended up producing a new range of products such from skateboards to tie-dyed T shirts. But this opposition, as vital and fundamental it was for some was disastrous for others. At the vanguards of political dissent the oppositional sociopolitical ideologies (perhaps embodied by the hippie movement on one end of the scale and European socialism on the other) the agents of change were relatively authentic and attuned to their causes. In the domain of art Jackson Pollock’s revolutionary ‘action’ painting is a case in point. Pollock’s work was seen as a challenge to form and ’liberation from value’⁴. This anarchic work⁵ which initially has the strategy of challenge and duel with the at world is finally appropriated by it, made a darling of form and eventually appropriated by the art market as the only art game in town. Here we see the beginning of the end of the true exchange value of the art form as it turns from revolutionary strategy to market object. We also see the systemic construction of a real that leads the political into the aesthetic and finally into the market. We start with the political and end up with a T-shirt.

What starts as a political weapon ends as a market weapon. Pollock ends up on a coffee cup. Where Baudrillard’s analysis is interesting is because he writes that market appropriation is a destruction of value in which value ‘disappears’ and ‘reappears’ as the hyperrreal. Therefore aesthetic value, (which was always technically an illusion), shifts from its symbolic and metaphoric gestures towards a new paradigm; the value of it as a commodity. Pollock appeared on tea towels and postcards as his radical painting becomes affected appropriated and integrated into the mainstream ‘catalogue’ of ideas. Pollock’s work became codified with meaning and its enigmatic radicalism was subsumed by its fiscal potential. Pollock’s work now stands in for something the art world could put value on and therefore become a coded simulation of value. This value was a copy without any real original because whatever enigmatic, symbolic gesture that rattled around in the artist subconscious was now merely a substitute for a dollar sign. Pollock’s original intention was modeled on artistic radicalism, the systematized market promoted a ‘real’ of Pollock which has no radical template at all and heads towards the kitsch.  As we shall see the market produces demand and paradoxically the public produces the idea that this has value as we shall see.

Most importantly, the telling pre-requisite of this shift from the radical aesthetic such as the original Pollock to the hyperreal such as what was cloned after Andy Warhol is that the subject actually demands it.  Consumers love to fetishize their once radical artists and thinkers re-packaged as consumer items. Dali goes onto a tie, Warhol onto a CD cover or Freud as a plaster cast model to sit on your desk. For Baudrillard, as stated we don’t consume the idea of objects but paradoxically produce the idea of consumption. All becomes production. What he means is because of the overwhelming influence of the media we are in a way a type of terminal for productive outputs, desiring directed by the whims of the market.  So we do not just consume Coca Cola but produce the idea that we are consumers of it. This becomes critically important if we are to understand the notion of a shift from the radical original through to the banal and economic. For the subject to act independently and autonomously, she must ‘produce’ ideas that are indeed independent of the ‘system of the real’. Freedom is not measured by the choice between Coca Cola or Pepsi, between going to see Spiderman 3 or Batman 3, but through knowing that the market is attempt to engineer the production of your private thoughts and then trying to minimize the nature of this production.

Fetishizing the object/ideology as….
Nowhere has this appropriation been more precisely exemplified than with the image of Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara. His image has been effectively and systematically neutralized by the marketing of art. Not the art of the political, but the art of the market. Regardless of his revolutionary politics and his bloody struggle, now the image emblazoned on T-shirts, buttons and chic posters means nothing associated with a political agenda, but with a banal commodified message: Che Guevara is ‘cool’.  Here we can see that the deeply cultural symbolic instances of what this political revolutionary stood for are replaced by him assuming everyday-ness (a little like the little man mentioned above.)

It would be worth taking some time do look at exactly how this notion of ‘cool’ actually ‘works’. Originally fêted as a word to serve as a African American geo-cultural marker ‘cool’ has slipped from its historical resonance to become a signifier of empty signification imposed by marketers for their own purposes. Everything from smoking to sunglasses pedaled by celebrities or sportspeople now comes with its own version of the empty signifier ‘cool’.  Karl Marx suggested that objects we have in our lives often had ‘magical’ properties and as a result we treat them with a fetishized reverence⁶.  For example he talks about gold in this way. In contemporary terms we can talk about a multitude of objects from mobile phones to shoes, from movies to movie stars. They are ‘cool’ because we see more in them than what is materially there, some magical properties to be tapped into.

In most ways this would not cause a problem and in terms of a market economy providing stable living conditions the capacity to see more in an object than is there itself becomes fundamental.  Our system relies on this excess. Consider what would happen if we didn’t consume beyond what was functionally necessary. The market has an absolute need for excess to be maintained. However the constant rhythmic drive for the new, for excess, for redundancy and for consumption comes with a great cost in terms of the political. When Marx was observing the fetishization of gold he had no idea of the Internet, of the digital, advertising psychology and so on which has thrown the demand for excess into overdrive. Now where these phenomena become problematic is in Late Capitalism’s drive for constantly renewal. The drive becomes, according to Baudrillard, ‘ecstatic’ where its capacity to perpetuate they system and radically alter it simultaneously is apparent. He says

Our all-too beautiful strategies of history, knowledge and power are erasing themselves. It is not because they have failed(they have, perhaps succeeded too well)but because in their progression they reached an dead point where their energy was inverted and they devoured themselves giving way to a pure and empty,  or crazy and ecstatic, form.

Baudrillard’s thesis is that embedded into the drive of Capital is the system of its own capitulation whereby each object is pushed to the limit of its functionality only to turn on itself. Reading with Baudrillard we can see that the change is dynamic, but ultimately our options may run out. Nothing stays stable in the market and even staple products such as shoes or water need to be re-engineered to ensure sales. We see this effect in contemporary cinema where we started with naïve innocence in depicting romance morphing towards non simulated sex scenes. First Bogart kisses Ingrid Bergman for less than three seconds and the audience swoons. Next step; another actress is persuaded to go topless in the name of her art. Finally the simulated sex scene becomes a clinical display of actual penetration in the name of ‘demystifying’ sex for the sake of art. For Baudrillard this is ob-scene because it is now more than (the ceremonies and rituals of) sex we are presenting. We lose the template of what romance is and replace it with a dispassionate lesson in the production of anatomical coupling. The pornography film industry is under threat as the clear line between sex for the market (porn) and sex for Art are deliberately blurred,    partly because film makers have reached what Baudrillard says is in effect the dead end of creativity when it comes to depicting romance.

And this is exactly the same structural undermining course that occurs with the political process. No more is this exemplified than in the cinema of popular culture. As we have seen with the iconic image of Che Guevara, political cinema has a profound (ceremonial) resonance that can aid the alterations of the course of history. Political movements can be massaged and accentuated by strong examples of popular cinema. Consider how causes such as feminism, gay or black rights have a serious political dimension highlighted by films such as Erin Brockovich (Soderburgh 2000), Philadelphia (Demme 1993) and Do the right Thing (Lee 1989) respectively. Whilst not world shatteringly successful these films popularized political message making their cause both accessible and identifiable for public consumption paving the way for enhanced opportunity for these minorities. This is not misty eyed liberalism, but an argument that deserves consideration. When the minority goes mainstream it is the beginning of a form of social change.

But, returning to Baudrillard this is also the beginning of the end for the political. As he reminds us, the excessive interventions of the market into culture ultimately results in a neutralization of value⁷.  What we are left with after the excess of involvement is a market that sniffs profit to be made from the political and moves in for the kill. The end result is we move from the political to the parody, from Philadelphia’s political message to Will and Grace’s hyperreal and clichéd depiction of homosexuality. The political message dissipates often lost in the realm of formula, devoid of punch because of the very ubiquity of its (over) use. We are often left with art forms that have reasonable political intention, but as a result of the intervention of a voracious market system we find the political message in its ‘obscene’ appearance neutering itself as we have said with Che Guevara.

Model/copy/simulacra…. Meddling with the symbolic

What are we then left with? Baudrillard suggests that behavior that is simulated, without an original. What he means here is that the representation of the object comes to overshadow what the object was meant to represent. This hyperbolic claim is best understood by looking once again at popular culture. In James McTeigue’s 2005 V for Vendetta we see a serious political dissertation. The world has become distinctly Orwellian and the amount of state control is violently enforced. Criticism is violently repressed. Into the film comes a mysterious figure, V, who instigates political dissidence through various violent and spectacular means. We can see in the film elements of our contemporary zeitgeist. The media is populated with over opinionated right wing zealots; the government massages the truth through this media. The police are corrupt at worst, selective at best. There is constant surveillance of the populace and an addiction to statistical surveys (which are illegally obtained). We can also the political effectiveness of V’s campaign for reform. The problem is that the film’s political content becomes overshadowed by the over use of special effects , highly choreographed and violent fight scenes. The political message in lost in explosions and stunts as we find we lose sights of V’s political quest and just barrack for him in a goodies versus baddies context. This is effectively the easy way out. The film can descend into fluff at the level of the political but still reap staggering box office because the punters did not buy tickets to see a dissertation on ideology, they paid to see a bit of the of ultra-violence.

Here image confuses the ideas that stand behind them to the point that no pressing idea is located behind the image other than what can be juxtaposed against other films in the genre. We stop talking about films with political resonance and keep talking about films with large explosions or highly choreographed and violent fight scenes. The symbolic significance of the cinema is reduced to copies of each other with minimal original models to be drawn upon. The metaphoric level of the film is barely perceivable. The incredibly dangerous thing is that the end result for some subjects is the inability to engage with the concrete and pressing dimension of their lives when they emerge from the cinema. When the United States government practiced rendition and sanctioned varieties of torture the sense of community outrage and resistance was somewhat muted because the profusion of ‘cinematic’ images makes it increasingly difficult to ascertain exactly what were the actual issues. While we watching the actual abuse of prisoners we are often left without the appropriate vocabulary to reflect upon it because this vocabulary has been stultified by mediated images of it. It is not that we have become de-sensitized to the violence but that we have become re-sensitized. What this means is that the mediated images of the film ‘work’ at re-casting what is preferenced, what is important and most pressingly what we should be doing about it.

Hence the proper message of the film V for Vendetta is that the government needs to be held to account by political will and radical refusal.  A superhero will not save us and the worst way to fight terrorism is to enter other countries with all guns blazing. We are slowly coming to realize that. We have not cornered the market of ideas; we only produce a version of the real that fits the contingent circumstances of the time.

Conclusion: Seducing the Image

The paradoxical thing about both Che Guevara image and V for Vendetta is although they both set out to strike some form of political radicalism they both end up helping to cause the problem they were trying to avoid. In the case of Guevara, the promotion of his homage as one of freedom becomes a slavish deference to consumerism and the purchasing of the products contribute to the very exploitations that he was fighting against. In the case of V for Vendetta the film’s dissertation on political corruption promotes the thesis that the only way to fight fascistic violence are ‘ideas’. However the idea comes packaged as raw, manic violence punctuated by throat slitting karate delivered revenge. In the end the world that so much desires restoration from the insidious fascism is to replace it with a highly trained superhero, one who can destroy evil with the ‘idea’ of  kung fu. The political ‘messaged’ conclusion is diluted by the pyrotechnic means and the message we have desired becomes Hollywood-ised into triviality.

In the end, to respond to this and achieve a more effective form of political resistance we might have to go through a form of what the Lacanian psychoanalyst’s term ‘subjective destitution’. This act is a radical refusal to symbolize or indeed to re-symbolize deployed by psychoanalytic patients in the process of being treated for their disorders. In basic terms, as an example, the arachnophobic (presumably after much therapy) suspends the association of spiders with trauma. Instead, the patient works through the traumatic symbolization in the hope of a re-learning the message that spiders have no deeper embedded fear, learning to live with the symptoms as it were. Many amongst us need to do the same with the filmic image. Thus when we watch V for Vendetta the pyrotechnics and the fight scenes do not have any deeper resonance and the films power is located in its political symbolisms. (It is not the fights that are ‘cool’ but the political message why they are fighting that strikes us as charged) Now the message is not diluted by the form of the film but strengthened by the radical ideas behind it. Then when we are confronted with the fascistic use of spin as a political weapon we do not karate chop the messenger but resist by not buying the message and voting the government out of office, demanding other-ness from the spin doctors. Similarly we should not purchase political iconography for aesthetic purposes. These attempts at the production of the real are only successful if we resist actively by working against them or refusing to play their game. But we must be careful.

Much of Jean Baudrillard’s latter work dealt with what he termed as ‘seduction’. In simple terms seduction is not only meant in its traditional sense but what allows traditional seduction to take place. Hence, when we go into purchase the T-shirt emblazoned with the face of Che Guevara some seductive desire arises. But what do I buy? It can never be what I really wanted because what I really wanted is illusory. This is the driving nature of desire that fills in the constant void being opened up by reality only to be ‘seductively’ filled in by our thoughts and actions. Now in adorning myself in the now muted message of the T-shirt I am seduced by the market and simultaneously attempting to seduce those around me into thinking I am cool. And the game goes on. But we need to do more than merely refuse to but the T-shirt or the coffee cup or the tea towel.
Baudrillard’s seduction is not merely refusal but more intricately developed. Seduction is not just refusal but the metaphysical necessity of desiring more from thinking, from returning ideas with  challenging counter ideas. When looked at this way V for Vendetta comes with the seductive opportunity to be challenged, rather than a totalized framing of some unassailable real. In actual life photographs attempt at capturing a real. Yet if we think of iconic political or social photographs such as those that emerged for the Vietnam War, the invasion of Iraq, or even the collapse of the Twin Towers they do not tell us one story but the potential for multiple stories. Embedded in a photograph is the seductive quality that can be, in effect, returned to it as a challenge. The image produces a real but the subject can return that production with a seductive challenge of their own.

For Baudrillard the strongest way to reverse this production was through by seduction. This challenge was affected by refusing to be told what the real was and attempting to make one of our own. The effect might be that we would disallow the media to shape the cultural consciousness to the extent it does today. We would become less addicted to the mediated image and to the screen. We would read more books and listen to more non commercial radio in the hope that our sense of the political real could be reinvigorated, challenged and seduced. Although late in his career Baudrillard often despaired at the state of the world perhaps we could suspend this pessimism and instead merely see it as his seductive strategy that cajoles us into action.

Russell Manning is a writer based in Melbourne Australia. His essay ‘The hyperrreal world of David Brent (Jean Baudrillard and The Office)‘ was published in The Office and Philosophy: Scenes from the Unexamined Life published by Wiley Blackwell.

Endnotes

1) We could consider the misogyny of Robert Rodriguez’s 2005 Sin City, the racism of Ron Clements’s 1992 Aladdin and so on.
2) Nietzsche, F. (1974). The Gay Science. New York, Vintage Books. S 108
3) Baudrillard, J. (1996). The System of Objects. London, Verso Books p.16
4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Pollock#Critical_debate (Accessed Nov 2008)
5) Baudrillard, J. (1998). Paroxysm. London Verso Books P.108
6) Marx, K. (1952). Capital. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. page unknown
7) Baudrillard, J. (1998). America, Verso Books. P 47