Utopia Deferred: Writings from Utopie (1967--1978) (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents) by Baudrillard, Jean (2006) Paperback

by Jean Baudrillard

The Utopie group was born in 1966 at Henri Lefebvre's house in the Pyrenees. The eponymous journal edited by Hubert Tonka brought together sociologists Jean Baudrillard, Rene Lourau, Catherine Cot, architects Jean Aubert, Jean-Paul Jungmann, Antoine Stinco, and landscape architect Isabelle Auricoste. Over the next decade, both in theory and in practice, the group articulated a radical ultra-leftist critique of architecture, urbanism, and everyday life. Utopia Deferred collects all of the essays Jean Baudrillard published in Utopie in their original form as well as a recent interview with the author. These essays, torn from the headlines of the tumultuous decade following May 1968, surpass Marxism itself.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Architecture, Politics

Paperback

First published September 1, 2006

About the author

Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher and poet, with interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as hyperreality. Baudrillard wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, critique of economy, social history, aesthetics, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his most well-known works are Seduction (1978), Simulacra and Simulation (1981), America (1986), and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991). His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism. Nevertheless, Baudrillard had also opposed post-structuralism, and had distanced himself from postmodernism.

Reviews

[v · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection begins with an interview: the interviewer asks Baudrillard dull, factual questions about his involvement with the radical leftist urbanist journal Utopie, and Baudrillard (in an especially morose mood, even for him) basically says that the journal ran out of steam after 1968, and furthermore he was just doing his own thing anyway. The selections in this volume rarely address utopia or urbanism, even more rarely show Lefebvre's influence, and never touch on architecture, plainly bearing out what Baudrillard said. Besides collecting essays that just happened to be published in Utopie and not someplace else, this book announces its own pointlessness at the start. It is basically Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings with more padding, and most selections are new translations of work Baudrillard would recycle elsewhere.

Whatever the merit of Baudrillard's ideas in his books of the 1970s, they work best in those books which, lacking much argumentation, at least discuss them at length. When capsulized as in this collection, concepts like "code" and "simulation" become stupendously incoherent, his tone devolves into the dogmatic, and his writing randomly strings together clauses like amino acids in junk DNA (often not even amounting to an actual sentence). Over the course of Utopie one reads him out-polemicize the Situationists, regress to bogus Bataille worship, and finally transition from mourning to melancholy: and all for what? This is radicalism for radicalism's sake, as Baudrillard admits.
More obscure or previously uncollected pieces typically fare even worse, with only "Technics as Social Practice" significantly supplementing his theories. The prescience, style, and attitude that distinguish his later journalistic cultural criticism in books like Screened Out is simply not here in these caustic, arrogant missives on labor strikes or the energy crisis (opt for The Divine Left: A Chronicle of the Years 1977-1984 instead). Early, rough versions of essays included here that later appeared in Simulacra and Simulation or Fatal Strategies are mildly interesting because they hint at Foucault's rapid fall from grace in Baudrillard's eyes, and the rubbery, farty deflation of Baudrillard's radicalism.

I've tried to get through this bloated Semiotext(e) pulp-squeezing at least three times already. It's easily Baudrillard's most tiresome book.