doing the laundry and the end of history

Jean Baudrilard_Screened Out

Throughout his writings, Baudrillard notes that a loss of reality afflicts much of contemporary culture; most certainly western contemporary culture. What is interesting is his extension of this observation into the realm of history and the historical record. It is fitting that much of Baudrillard’s writing in Screened Out with regards to history occurs in the final decade of the twentieth century leading up to the year 2000; that new millennium and a ‘new beginning’ for history itself. It is within this context that Baudrillard comments upon the phenomenon of revivalism, of what he saw as the societal vogue for collective revivalism which had arisen in the latter stages of the twentieth century; a “collective hallucination” occurring around topics, ideologies, and events such as the Cold War, Hiroshima, Nazism, Fascism, the holocaust, nuclear warfare, freedom, human rights, etc.

According to Baudrillard, through the revival of its past, society would be able to whitewash its modern history; to take up the momentous historical events of the twentieth century and launder them, cleansing its collective memory of them in a way; cleaning up the historical record via a sort of generalized cultural amnesty. Through a societal process centered around a compulsion to relive history, a compulsion driven by the “profound sense of guilt at not having been there,” and the associated enthusiastic work of mourning for and of the significant events of the twentieth century, everything that had taken place in this century was in effect given a face-lift in an act of cultural repentance. This gigantic process of historical revisionism, in the mind of Baudrillard, was a mechanism of self-defense, the self-defense of a society which had disappeared from the political and historical scene and was thus incapable of generating its own history. Consequently, it was this society which resorted to a systematic re-hashing of history to “prove its own existence, and to prove to its own crimes.”

Historical revisionism, then, was a search for post-mortem truths within history. Problem being, that this search was occurring at a point in time when there was, quite simply, not enough truth around for society to verify the truthfulness of the truths it was ‘locating’, and neither enough history per se to produce any “historical proof of what actually happened.” In other words, many of the events of the twentieth century could no longer be understood historically, and consequently, truth could not be derived from them. In any case, revivalism and revisionism spelled the end of history for Baudrillard; either its demise as deep-frozen history within our collective cultural memory or as the end of history via its dissipation in the expansion of communication. Either the death of history by freezing, or the death of history by the hyper-fluidity and hyper-circulation of its events.

Consequently, Baudrillard positions himself so that he is logically able to question whether or not all these events really existed. And what allows him to make such a provocative statement is his belief that through our hyper-analysis of historical events, these events, ideas, and histories have themselves become largely unintelligible. The more these phenomena are examined and rooted through, the more we come to understand all the little details of these phenomena and the better we understand their causes and reasons for occurring, the more their existence fades; the more confused we become over the very identity of these events in the first place.

As a further complication in this matter, Baudrillard cites the supplanting of history by the media in contemporary times. Here again, we confront the problem of reality and its fragile relationship with history. As Baudrillard often points out, our understanding of the reality of the world around us so often arrives via the filter of the media, “the tragic events of the past included.” In our contemporary times, how can history be certified as real, when the tools of historical intelligibility have seemingly disappeared? Through the media reconstruction of event, history is reconstituted as myth whereby the very reality and truthfulness of history can no longer be guaranteed: Baudrillard’s end of history.

What is interesting then is that while Baudrillard was writing primarily with regards to the final decade of the twentieth century and its endpoint, in many ways, the phenomena he is discussing have continued well into the early twenty-first century. At one point, Baudrillard writes that it is the nature of the west to increasingly become a repository, or better still a dumping ground for all those ideologies and events which fall under the category of freedom and human rights. Specifically, and quite locally, I find myself considering the phenomenon of the to-be-constructed Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

What becomes evident when one visits the promotional website for the Canadian Museum of Human Rights is that this museum will at least in part be yet another act of historical revivalism and revisionism, another re-hashing of history in a move of “lest-we-forget-ism.” When one loads the opening page to the Canadian Museum of Human Rights website, the visitor is bombarded by the provocative imagery of its flash introduction, which is followed by a 20 minute video presentation outlining the museum’s vision, mission, and goals as well as the emotional rollercoaster that visitors to the museum will be party to. Guests will wind their way through the various levels of what is to be the largest Human Rights Museum in the world on a 1.5 km long “life altering experience.” This journey will be in essence a walk of mourning, a process of reliving the significant human rights events, both atrocities and successes, of our collective western history. In this sense, much of our history will become flash-frozen in these exhibits, forever on display, forever a source of raw emotion, forever a reminder of a past history in an age when the historical record is constantly being called into question. It will be representative of our incessant search for a history with some weight to it when the whole of our current day events and occurrences are trivialized and diluted in their immediate exposure and circulation.

And in our contemporary context, what can we do but call the authenticity of these stories, of these histories into question? After all, this museum will be a prime example of how Baudrillard describes history as having been supplanted by the media enterprise, how history is heavily filtered. While support for the museum is widespread (it will be the recipient of funding from the Government of Canada, the Province of Manitoba, and the City of Winnipeg), the museum is largely the brainchild of the late media giant Israel Asper, his family, and the Asper Foundation. Upon its completion, the museum will in fact remain in the control of the Asper Foundation rather than the Heritage Department which usually oversees museum operations. In this light, there has been concern and criticism of the museum’s programming as hypocritical an d biased; those events which will be granted a permanent place within the exhibit halls of the museum have fallen under scrutiny, not because of what has been included, but rather that which has, at least thus far, been excluded.

While the content of the museum is to include stories and records of the injustices against, Jews, Ukrainians, Rwandans, Cambodians, Bosnians, and Aboriginal Peoples, as well as exhibits championing reproductive rights, sexual rights, and same-sex rights, certain histories have been excluded, most notably any mention of the atrocities committed against Palestinian civilians. This may or may not be ‘coincidental.’ The Asper media enterprise has after all had a tendency to support Israel, the Iraq War, and the War on Terror, while Asper himself was very much opposed to the idea of Palestinian nationhood and any support of the Palestinian cause in general. Furthermore, the advisory council which will make many of the decisions regarding the museum’s formation is mysteriously missing any participants from Arab or Islamic or Caribbean or African or Turkish Armenian groups. And while it may be the case that a larger advisory board including representatives from these groups would be cumbersome, one has a feeling that if Jewish or Native Canadian groups were not so represented on this board, there would be a deafening outcry.

The point to be made then is that history has indeed changed forever; the relation between an event and the record of that event has forever shifted. As Baudrillard has pointed out, our reality today, including the events of the past, arrive via a media reconstruction, in this case, that of the Asper Foundation and its board of directors. Furthermore, regardless of what side of the argument one is on, whether it be in support of the museum as is, or calling for a more comprehensive set of histories for its exhibits, the fact remains that both parties are engaged in a pathological revival of the past, in a compulsion to relive a previous history which we have lost the ability to truly comprehend because of our hyper-analysis of it and the resulting clouding and confusion of these events which we have created. In these ways, history becomes reconstituted as myth, wherein the reality and truthfulness of history can no longer be guaranteed: Baudrillard’s end of history.