Baudrillard Smoking
Re-read a Baudrillard essay today (“The Evil Demon of Images”). I know that in a sense the essay is supposed to be a downer and everything–but that’s not the way I actually read it. I guess I just keep missing the point because while reading it I just find myself getting excited about all the nostalgic things I like (like the vintage overstock glasses I just got from American Apparel).
For Baudrillard there’s this “[perverse] relation between the image and its referent, the supposed real,” because, “as simulacra, images precede the real” at the same time as “they always appear to refer to a real world”. Basically the initial problem created by simulacrum is the chicken-egg scenario it produces.
But then the ‘real perversion’ comes in when the evil demon of images begins to “contaminate reality and to model it, when it only conforms to reality the better to distort it, or better still: when it appropriates reality for its own ends, when it anticipates it to the point that the real no longer has time to be produced as such” (445). But this is where I actually start to get kind of excited about the possibilities of the demon of images, because here I am not reading this as an abnegation of the real, but rather as a conscious species self-direction of it, so much so that ‘real-life’ begins to be able to come closer to fantasy, and fantasy is increasingly able to anticipate and dictate the real of life. Baudrillard interprets this as a problem, but it just sounds fun to me, and this sort of potential for actively creating our reality I think is one of the main reasons human beings pursue art as seriously as they do.
Anyway a really visible and obvious example of this I think are those successful advertisement campaigns that people just somehow love-–those campaigns that are able to make some new fantasy-life-product seem so perfect and real to you that it’s almost nostalgic, to the point where these advertisers can predict and dictate your real life and sell it to you, force it on to you in this really insidious way–but yet in this way that still makes you really willing and even eager to consume it anyhow. My favorite current example of such demon images would be the ad campaigns at American Apparel:
American Apparel Ad Example
The folks in control of ‘the means of production’ of these demon images, control a large part of what we will come to accept and experience as reality. See, as theorists have noted, the contemporary moment tends to seem the most real and legitimate when it is also the most ‘retro’ and nostalgic, and this is the fact of contemporary culture that American Apparel understands. We let them sell us overpriced neon leggings and scrunchies and convince us that ‘jazzercize’ never died and that acid washed jean fabric ‘is normal again’ because as soon as we see those demon images, those perfectly seductive advertisements that all look like the first frames of an erotic film circa 1973 (as one blogger put it), we are absolutely hopelessly hypnotized by the magic of nostalgia; remember, the amazing thing about nostalgia is that it is always already more real than the reality of any contemporary moment-–a natural fact in memories, but a potentially ‘perverse’ one when the photograph becomes the medium of nostalgia. Supposedly. Don’t know if I buy it though.
Anyway, let’s look again at the spell American Apparel ads put us under:
American Apparel Appeals to Gays
First, they’re sexy, but in a particular way–they’re old, pre-AIDS, amateur porn, sexy. At the same time as they’re provocative, sometimes even extremely so, they’re also somehow really ’safe’ and ‘naive’, like you’d never even have to wear a condom or anything. Next, everything they make is the same color and fabric as ‘when you were a kid’–and think about it, it’s true, things were somehow just more real back then. So then everything about the ad seduces you until you break down and buy the jumpsuit and you wear it and feel relief because your life really is more legit and authentic now, just like it was for people in the photographs of ‘real life’ that you looked at when you were a kid.
American Apparel Pink Underwear
What makes American Apparel perfect is that you can buy the t-shirt that will make you feel real , authentic, and relevant to your time, perfectly in place like somebody from an old family photo-book, but without having to do the work of sifting through a thrift store for some worn out old clothes that don’t fit right, smell right, look right or make you feel the way you want them too. And what’s more, it really is not old stuff, either. It’s sexy, edgy, new stuff, nostalgia + the future, the nostalgia of the future. Really, I think the one thing about American Apparel that’s completely perfect is that they skillfully accomplish the impossible: they take the past but make it ‘right’ this time, succeeding in fulfilling one of the most fundamental wishes of the species, the wish to overcome the tyrannies of time and regret.
I feel like this is analogous to the phenomenon Baudrillard talks about in regard to the aesthetic of the film “The Last Picture Show“. He says about the film: “You need only be sufficiently distracted, as I was, to see it as a 1950s original production: a good film of manners and the ambiance of small town America, etc. A slight suspicion: it was a little too good, better adjusted, better than the others, without the sentimental, moral and psychological tics of the films of that period. Astonishment at the discovery that it is a 1970s film, perfectly nostalgic, brand new, retouched, a hyperrealist restitution of a ’50′s film”.
American Apparel is exactly that hyperrealist restitution of all the ‘cool stuff your parents wore’, except that all of the baggage of previous generations is torn out of it now, and all that’s left is the hollow, pristine aesthetic of the garment, completely meaningless, not to mention hot. Baudrillard says “A whole generation of films [read American Apparel merchandise] is appearing which will be to those we have known what the android is to man: marvelous, flawless artifacts, dazzling simulacra which lack only an imaginary and that particular hallucination which makes cinema [fashion?] what it is…[in them] all the toxic radiation has been filtered out, all the ingredients are present in precise doses, not a single mistake”.
But I kind of think all of this proliferation of simulacra is something we might celebrate. Baudrillard is too much of a downer when he says about our “modern media images: if they fascinate us so much it is not because they are sites of the production of meaning and representation–-this would not be new-–it is on the contrary because they are sites of the disappearance of meaning and representation, sights in which we are caught quite apart from any judgement of reality, thus sites of a fatal strategy of denegation of the real and of the reality principle.” I don’t agree with him that meaning disappears when it is reproduced in modern media. I think it’s rather just a different take on meanings and reality–not a destruction of the reality principle, but a reinterpretation.
Anyway though, so, who wins: Baudrillard, or American Apparel? I say American–yay pastiche!
And to celebrate: here’s a couple ‘empty’ yet ‘satisfying’ retro-inspired gems from the Valerie Collective. They really do take the past and make it right this time.
