lyotard, baudrillard,

& althusser
MARCH 6, 2014 ~ AURELIOMADRID

Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Althusser

Of the three philosophers selected for this post, only one, Jean-
François Lyotard writes specifically about art. Whereas the other
two, Jean Baudrillard and Louis Althusser deal with
complimentary issues that easily segue into aesthetics. With
the question of how these French 20th century philosopher’s
concepts relate to aesthetic issues, it will be worthwhile to
briefly outline what each philosopher theorized, then in turn,
how these ideas are relatable to aesthetics. Also, as much as
their ideas can be put into an aesthetic context, each of these
three thinker’s wide reaching ideas adapt to the political, the
social, and the economic situation/s of our contemporary (post-
modern) world without distortion.
Not only do all three philosophers share the same language and
nationality, they also share in the legacy of Marxist thought.
The most stridently Marxist was Althusser. One might be
inclined to dub him a Marxist apologist. Because Althusser was
so entrenched in Marxist doctrine, he arduously refined and
reexamined how Marx was read. There is not just one way to
read Marx, and Althusser had to find ways to read him that
countered the political trends of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Althusser
broke new ground in his description and theorizing concerning
the inner workings of ideology, which Marx also identified as a
problem, just not in the same degree that Althusser did.
Ideology couldn’t be discarded, yet for Althusser, theory would
take center stage. It was within theory that Althusser identified
his concept of hailing. Hailing basically encapsulates
interpellation. “All ideology hails or interpellates concrete
individuals as concrete subjects.”[1]

In the most general sense, interpellation means that all (yes all)
ideology actively assumes everyone should take part in its
ideological prescriptions. For capitalism this means that
everyone is interpellated at the workplace: ‘there is no I in
team.’ For society this means that everyone is interpellated in
the public sphere: ‘shake hands with people you meet.’ For
economics this means that everyone is interpellated in an
economic sphere: ‘save your money for retirement.’ It all makes
‘common sense’ and none of these slogans are typically
regarded of as ideological, since ideology works best when it
doesn’t identify itself as such.[2]

But what about art?—how does art interpellate the audience? A

viewer mistakenly presupposes that everyone knows the ‘rules’
of the game, if such rules can be said to be real to begin with.
Such presupposed rules could be an ideal that all art must
somehow be beautiful, or that art must incessantly aspire to
beauty. This simultaneously suggests that art cannot be ugly
and that if art looks unappealing (to us) in some way, we judge
to be wrong. Interpellation easily works both ways, art presents
ideological subjects, as with social realism (Stalin adores the
rosy cheeked proletariat). And as noted, an audience can bring
its ideology to the act of viewing art, ‘my child can do that’ is
code for: I cannot see the value in this painting, beyond the
efforts of a child, because my narrow idealism demands nothing
less than the allure of old-fashioned academicism.

Lyotard presents another way that Marxist theory affected

philosophy and the arts, albeit his Marxist influence is much
less militant than Althusser’s. Probably one of the first to put
postmodernism into name, Lyotard wrote convincingly of a new
kind of relativism, a.k.a. the metanarrative. “Simplifying to the
extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward
metanarratives.”[3] This meant that the so-called ‘grand
narratives’ of the past were no longer the only narratives that
mattered, or that they were no longer the ones that carried the
utmost power. These metanarratives are seen as stemming
mostly from the rationalist ideals of the Enlightenment, such as:
the authority of science, the dominance of Christian doctrine,
and of course, the supremacy of rationalism itself. This idea has
multiple readings, and most of it has a thin (and strong) Marxist
thread throughout, that obviously seeks to delimit the powers
that be. Decentralizing power means that a special kind of
relativist paradigm must prevail, and this is a problem with
Lyotard’s death of the metanarrative that cannot be addressed
here, yet relativism should be recognized as a dominate
symptom of postmodernity.

For society at large, Lyotard critiques, and calls into question,

the ascendance of scientific supremacy. With his ideas, one is
better equipped to seriously question if science does indeed
have all the answers, and, if the scientific pursuit of getting to
know the secrets of the universe is really all that helpful for
mankind. Rationality too thinks it has all the answers, but it
easily forgets the value of intuition, randomness and the
uncompleted. Amidst these things, (postmodern) art has special
place, since it tries to represent the unrepresentable, at least in
Lyotard’s brilliant way of refining Kant’s aesthetic notion of the
sublime. To represent the unrepresentable sounds like nonsense
if one is only interpreting the idea with a rational lens. That
which cannot be named, must be that which is mysterious and
enigmatic. Paradoxically, if art chooses to negate the
unrepresentable, it would look something like advertising, we’d
all ‘get it’ and its value would fade, duly its essential and
sublime mystery would be automatically lost.[4]

Of the three theorists, Baudrillard stands as the most

identifiable to a general audience, due to his (dubious and
loose) connection to The Matrix. One easily forgets that
Baudrillard wrote compelling philosophy, if the polished
cinematic science-fiction—that’s supposed to emulate his ideas
—doesn’t take half as much time to read as one of his finely
crafted, labyrinthine essays. His idea of simulacrum replaces
the real not by mere imitation, but by nothing at all. The
simulacra are mostly the empty signs of capitalist excess and
power relations. The referent is empty. Hyperreality defines this
familiar pseudo-reality because we can no longer tell the
difference between the real and the simulacra. “By crossing into
a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that
of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of
all referentials…”[5] Political scandal epitomizes what
Baudrillard describes because we are simply unable to detect
what real political power actually is, amidst the intrigue, gossip
and scandal of Washington insiders. We are led to believe that
politics has more to do with what makes the news, rather than
the ‘boring’ work of actually getting things done on a daily
basis. For the art world, Baudrillard’s concepts hit with
surprising force during a time in the 80s and 90s when
questions of the copy, appropriation, sampling, authenticity,
etc., were becoming critical aspects of a postmodern
reevaluation of the puritanical dogma/s of modernism.
Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacra is necessarily empty, and
not a mere copy of reality, still, his foreboding pessimism glares
with cynicism, since he exposes where we as a society are
lacking. He presented a dystopian vision, yet the provocation
haunts us all the same.

Where would we be if we were not critical of the transparent

powers that impregnate authority? Marxism seems to have
failed in the political arena, however, it continues to
demonstrate its capacity to undermine established ways of
thinking. Its power is dialectical. It moves critical thinking ahead
by the strife of intellectual exposure and disclosure. It’s easy to
be smug and narrow. These things don’t require alternative
modes of analysis. All three of the philosophers presented here
have demonstrated alternate routes from the mainstream. But,
when will we listen?

aurelio madrid

Bibliography
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses:
Notes Towards an Investigation.” In On Ideology, Translated by
Ben Brewster, 1-60. New York: Verso, 2008.

Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of Simulacra.” In Simulacra

and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, 1-42. Ann
Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Harrison, Charles and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory: 1900-

2000, An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Malden, Massachusetts:
Blackwell Publishing, 2003.

Lyotard, Jean-François. “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on

Knowledge” and “What is Postmodernism?” in The Postmodern
Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi, 1-82. Minneapolis, Minnesota:
The University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

[1] Althusser, Louis, “Ideology and State Apparatuses,” 47.

[2] Althusser names this phenomena: denegation.

[3] Jean-François Lyotard, intro to “The Postmodern Condition,”

xxiv.

[4] …never-mind what this means for an interpretation of Pop

Art or Warhol’s claim that there’s ‘nothing behind it.’

[5] Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” 2.