Why Is There Nothing—Rather Than Something?

Abstract

Why Is There Nothing—Rather Than Something? Jeffrey R. Di Leo (bio) It is not often that one can date the high point of a philosopher's career to a movie scene. And it is even less frequent that the philosopher would disavow said film. But such is the case with Jean Baudrillard. On March 31, 1999, directors Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, released The Matrix. The film, which the Wachowski's said was inspired by Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation (1994), prominently featured the book as a prop early in the film. But unlike say Heineken, which is used as a prop in Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015)—and has been a corporate partner with the James Bond film franchise since Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)—Baudrillard had no corporate skin in The Matrix. In fact, he said that the film was not representative of his philosophical views in Simulacra and Simulation—and claimed that The Matrix was the type of film the evil Matrix program (from the film) would make about the Matrix. Says Baudrillard, "the real nuisance in this movie is that the brand-new problem of the simulation is mistaken with the very classic problem of illusion, already mentioned by Plato." Shortly after the release of The Matrix, Baudrillard's theoretical star would come crashing down in the scholarly world via his views on the fall of the Twin Towers and terrorism. But his popular image as the philosophical inspiration of The Matrix, a film whose box office receipts were nearly half a billion dollars, would make Simulacra and Simulation one of the most well-known props for postmodern philosophy. But two decades removed from the hoopla of the film and the tragic events of September 11, 2001, and more than a quarter of a century from the publication of the book, should we still be blaming Baudrillard for the death of theory? Or does that famous prop have a very different legacy in contemporary theory? Given time and distance, I'm more inclined now to the latter view. [End Page 1] But to make my case, we will need to go back to some of the lesser-known philosophical work that led to Simulacra and Simulation—and forward to a key work that came after it. _______ Jean Baudrillard's world is one filled with objects. "Our urban civilization is witness to an ever-accelerating procession of generations of products, appliances and gadgets," he comments in The System of Objects (1968), "by comparison with which mankind appears to be a remarkably stable species." This book, his first, argues that social life is structured by our consumption of these objects. "Could we classify," asks Baudrillard, "the luxuriant growth of objects as we do a flora or fauna, complete with tropical and glacial species, sudden mutations, and varieties threatened by extinction?" Baudrillard explores the classification system of consumer objects that code social behavior and consumer groups. In this work, he reconsiders consumer society through a Marxism tempered by Ferdinand de Saussure and Sigmund Freud, that is, by use of linguistic categories rather than economic ones. For him, we live in a consumer society wherein traditional Marxist analysis fails to capture the status of objects. Commodities post-1945 have a communicational structure that can only be captured by a semiotics that relies not on a referential model akin to Charles Peirce, but rather a differential one like Saussure. Baudrillard's semiotics combines aspects of Freud and Saussure to show how in the commodity word and image is related to desire, rather than use value or utility. Symbols provide the codes that differentiate one consumer product from another. Upon consumption, symbols then transfer meaning from the product to its consumer. Moreover, as a poststructuralist, the free-play of this semiotics is potentially endless, and provides the consumer with a strong sense of freedom and self-determination within the hyperreality of the new semiotic condition of consumer society. It is hyperreality because in Baudrillard's system one cannot get outside of the fantasies and desires generated by consumer consumption within the system of objects. In Baudrillard's economy of signs, individuals are not making consumption choices based on tastes in...