Introduction: The Object in France Today

Abstract

Gilles Lipovetsky has aptly characterized the last two decades of the twentieth century as a period of ideologies crumbling into ethical ambiguity and contradictory values... This introductory material is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol20/iss2/2 The Object in France Today Martine Antic University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Gilles Lipovetsky has aptly characterized the last two decades of the twentieth century as a period of ideologies crumbling into ethical ambiguity and contradictory values. As belief in ideals has faded, they have ceased to function as models for ordering sociopolitical networks and world views. And now, in the ideological ruins piling up in the midst of dissonant discourses and discordant behaviors, the representational modalities of dilapidated utopias are the relics retrieved in archeological attempts to define the current fin de siecle: Le monde contemporain offre le tableau du capitalisme imperialiste liberal apres qu' il a triomphe de ses deux derniers challengers, le fascisme et le communisme: ainsi parlerait le marxisme, s'il n' etait pas defunt `Today's world offers the portrait of imperialist liberal capitalism having triumphed over its last two challengers: fascism and communism; or so Marxism would say, if it weren't defunct' (Lyotard 200). A transitional era par excellence, the moribund twentieth century is listlessly trying to define what it was, at a moment when, as Jameson says, the meaning of history escapes us. In the age of recycling we are witnesses at the trial of originality; literary and artistic production is being questioned: one of the greatest paradoxes of contemporary is that at a time when the image reigns supreme the very notion of a creative imagination seems under mounting threat (Kearney 3). For Virilio and Kittler the artist's individuality is questionable now that computerized information and infography can be adapted for the generation of texts and images. Synthesized images are in fact not images of something, they are devoid of a reference and have no object. For Baudrillard the synthesized image, like the video image, is caught up in an epidemic. contagion des images qui s'engendrent elles-memes sans 1 Antle: Introduction: The Object in France Today Published by New Prairie Press 316 STCL, Volume 20, No. 2 (Summer, 1996) reference a un reel ou a un imaginaire est-elle mettle virtuellement sans limites, et cet engendrement sans limites produitl'information comme catastrophe 'The epidemic of self-engendering images that do not refer to any real or imaginary world is virtually uncontrollable, and this limitless proliferation produces information as catastrophe' (Illusion 85). Referenceless images are reality dummies, a sham set up in lieu of reality; as such, they bring into question our relationship to the real. The profusion of such referenceless images attests to a fascination with simulation in today's societies, and to what Clement Rosset calls ce desk d'aucune chose reelle `this desire for nothing real' which releve en somme d'un attrait du vide qui se manifeste aussi, et de maniere plus exemplaire encore, dans une halucination qui fait periodiquement 'la une' de l'actualite philosophique ou litteraire: rid& d'une fin du monde probable et imminente 'arises from the attraction of the void, which is manifest in the hallucination that periodically is the center of a philosophical or literary attention: the presumption that the end of the world is near' (78). This vision of a world where we are no more than passive spectators has its gurus and its opponents. Eco attacks it in what he calls cultural guerrilla warfare. Kearney has developed a series of strategies of resistance to the dangers of simulation. All levels of society reflect a re-narrativization of socio-political phenomena. Deprived of all notions of transcendence, objects are deformed and de-realized. Their appearance and content are questioned. The city has been taken over by the megalopolis. The supermodern, as Marc Auge calls the contemporary era, produces non-lieux nonplaces,' the generic loci of banality, such as airports and hypermarkets. Pacific Bell's cable project introduces today in France the notion of a film industry without film. Virilio's zero degree of life style and Baudrillard's xerox degree of culture show up in the novels of the 1980s and 1990s, as a new generation of writers, while still assuming the primacy of the written word, is transforming literature and its characters according to the contradictions of contemporary culture. I have selected four texts as examples. 1. In Jean-Philippe Toussaint's La Salle de bain (The Bathroom 1985), an immobilized character is reduced to the zero degree of life style. In this and other of Toussaint's texts we witness the disappearance of the object as it is situated and mediated by a series of screens and windows. Vision is constantly pro2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 20, Iss. 2 [1996], Art. 2 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol20/iss2/2 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1392