The bulk of this review was written shortly before Baudrillard’s death on 6 March, 2007. I contemplated a subsequent re-draft, but reasoned that in any critique of Baudrillard, the hyper-real will inevitably secede chronology, therefore any attempt to destabilise ‘flux’ with ‘actuality’ would completely defeat the object of the exercise. If one were inclined to be slightly cruel (and I have so far encountered several people who were) then Baudrillard’s death itself is ‘hyper-real’, unable to be proved as an event beyond the flux. Converting this observation away from its vindictive genesis, the majority of us will remember Baudrillard’s work, rather than the man - his death is therefore negotiable because his work shows no signs of being forgotten.

It is always tempting to imagine Jean Baudrillard preparing to write a book by sharpening an axe, swinging it into his computer monitor, then gluing the shattered pieces to a celluloid film reel, projecting it to a crowded room full of admirers and absolutely forbidding them to take it seriously. With Fragments, this may not be terribly far from the truth. A seemingly random collection of rants, observations and theories whose structure affords no over arching argument or narrative, Fragments covers subjects ranging from automatic cash dispensers to the degeneration of an erotic statue in the gardens of Luxembourg, which celebrates a man whom Baudrillard muses may have invented the dildo. Fragments is not, in short, an easy book to get through. Stylistically, it is a book to dip in and out of, perhaps one with which to open a page at random and digest a Baudrillardean maxim for the day. Quite how one would turn a sardonic ‘fragment’ such as ‘In the empty space of desire, the seats are expensive’ into a motto with which to face the daily grind, however, is slightly beyond me.

Whilst this isn’t going to imbue the book with a particularly strong commercial bent, I don’t imagine that will bother either the writer or publisher. Baudrillard has firmly established himself as ‘postmodernity’s quintessential theorist’, and staying true to form, seems to have busied himself ever since with attacking his own importance. For example, in one of the early fragments of the book, he spits ‘credulity is so widespread… Even an entirely made-up quotation from Ecclesiastes receives official corroboration by the fact of its being published.’ His referral back to the erroneous ‘Bible’ quotation at the opening of his seminal essay ‘The Precession of Simulacra’ indicates, rather maddeningly, that there is no way a reader can adopt a stance on Baudrillard that Baudrillard will approve of. If we dismiss him, we vindicate his assertions of human ignorance. If we agree with him, we just piss him off even more. Which is heartening, in a way - whatever this review says, he would never agree with it, so I’m pretty much free to write whatever I want.

And, whilst my objectivity is somewhat compromised by being an a priori admirer, I choose to see this as Baudrillard’s intention. Endlessly pursuing his thoughts through intractable observations with no fixed parameters beyond the need for flux, this book seems more by-product than product, an incidental vapour trail left behind on another furious voyage into a world that has long since destroyed its foundations. Every object or artefact available to human perception is, to Baudrillard at least, a mask to cover artifice. Unveiling this artifice will lead no closer to any objective ‘truth’ - ‘truth’ itself is in all probability a blasphemous concept in the world we are presented with here. The placement of the reader is therefore entirely at the reader’s own discretion - by eliminating the mechanics of conventional ‘argument’, Baudrillard has created a wholly autonomous text that refutes all didacticism. The reader is offered no safety net upon which to construct their reactions, and subsequently any reaction they have will be the product of nothing more than individual choice.

I realise this probably all sounds a little too positive for a text written by an ‘apocalyptic’ theorist (thank you, blurb), but then I for one have never found Baudrillard particularly depressing. His identification of flux as the only constant within contemporary perspective has always appeared to me as an enabler of epistemological freedom - the ‘desert of the real,’ being divorced from its role as the progenitor of any universal ‘truths’ is as much a playground as it is a dungeon. Which leads me on to my final point - Fragments is, in places, hysterically funny. This is true whether we are being treated to a rare moment of Baudrillardean whimsy - ‘Can we imagine a video dispenser which would identify everyone by their smile, and not by their code or their fingerprints?’ - or observing a caustic attack on the atavistic qualities of insurance companies:

Rival advertisements for insurance companies. We assure you:

From the cradle to the grave
From the womb to the tomb
From the sperm to the worm
From erection to resurrection

We are witnessing, above all, a man rambling at us with his thoughts on a world that he is still not comfortable with, but familiar enough now that he can see the funny side.

Fragments is not a book that will please everyone. Its style is experimental, which some people will see as pretentious; it makes no promises beyond ‘doing what it says on the tin’, and is likely to enrage some admirers of Baudrillard’s earlier work, coming to look for the next vitriolic dissection of postmodern society. I for one, however, thoroughly enjoyed it, and it would seem to me that the phrase ‘I for one’ is the most appropriate, if not the only way, of responding to this book.

In memory of Jean Baudrillard, 1929-2007 (?)