Gerry Coulter, Jean Baudrillard: From the Ocean to the Desert, or the Poetics of Radicality

Abstract

Gerry Coulter, Jean Baudrillard: From Ocean to Desert, or Poetics of Radicality. Skyland, NC: Inter-Theory, 2012, 190 pp., $22.00 paper (978-0-9789902-4-4) Many readers of Jean Baudrillard forget that he began his career teaching German and was a prolific translator into French of Weiss, Brecht, and Marx and Engels among others. Gerry Coulter has not forgotten vocation of this prehistoric Baudrillard. The most provocative insight of Jean Baudrillard: From Ocean to Desert, or Poetics of Radicality, is that while teaching high-school German he was chosen to translate (p. 36). While Coulter has not written an intellectual biography, his use of understudied incidents and contexts aid his interpretation of Baudrillard's greatest insights. Coulter then gathers together Baudrillard's scattered references to Holderlin in his works and from them builds a case for a shared poetic sensibility. This does not entail that Baudrillard is a romantic. Rather, in Baudrillard's case this sensibility is linked to his theory of resolution of world in reversibility of events, whose germinal form is found in Holderlin. However, Holderlin that Baudrillard produces is anagrammatized Coulter explains (p. 49), referring to gathering of scattered traces of partial signs to constitute a counter-message that undermines obvious message. Coulter provides a new route into Holderlin beyond beaten path of Heidegger. His efforts are an advance on suggestive clues about Baudrillard's beginnings dropped by Mike Gane in early 1990s. Another figure whose influence on Baudrillard--though Coulter dislikes this term--looms large is Roland Barthes. This is a complex relationship that began with Barthes' role as academic advisor to Baudrillard, but is worked through in terms of how Barthes' views on writing as transgressive, pleasurable, and gamemanship, dovetailed with of Baudrillard. Coulter does not dwell on obvious correspondence between early semio-structural books of Baudrillard which are heirs to Barthes' own theoretical statements on semiology, fashion, and narrative. Instead, he focuses on relationship between language and meaning. Both thinkers struggle to escape from but in different ways. In a probing section dealing with this issue, Coulter shows how they brush shoulders on meaning's frightening terroristic dimension (p. 22), with pursuing unique concepts like signifiers without signifieds, and empty signs; whereas Baudrillard pursues somewhat relentlessly meaning's own objective undoing of itself. Baudrillard's antipositivism, disdain for truth and proof for sake of enigma and charm of appearances seems more extreme or, as Coulter nicely puts it, pressed outward (p. 26), than Barthes' recourse to the preemption of meaning in his book on Japan, or destabilization of in general. Coulter is mostly interested in what critics call second Barthes who turned his back on method for reflective, aphoristic essays and hedonistic style. This corresponds to Baudrillard's direction since 1980s, at least since his book America. Indeed, Coulter considers America to be pivotal, and Janus-faced: those who have difficulty taking Baudrillard seriously may have had misfortune of making their first read of his work America ... (p. 65); yet, 'America is testing ground for some of ideas and great Baudrillard has been encountering for a number of years (p. 66). The one great thought in question is reversibility (the idea that all systems lead to their own demise [p. 51]), and Coulter maps its emergence in Baudrillard's books over decades, in addition to delineating its intersections with challenge, duel, seduction, implosion, counter-gift, fatal and object-oriented theory, and evil. These concepts are strategically deployed with a number of ends: to further systemic collapse; to carve out singular spaces of unorganized resistance; to refuse choice between meaninglessness and meaningfulness. …