loyal to the canon of high culture in literature, music, and the
visual and performing arts. But I’ve also enjoyed a lot of
popular music, for example. It seemed we were trying to
understand why that was perfectly possible and why that wasn’t
paradoxical… and what diversity or plurality of standards
might be. However, it didn’t mean abolishing hierarchy, it
didn’t mean equating everything. In some sense I was as much a
partisan or supporter of traditional cultural hierarchy as any
cultural conservative, but I didn’t draw the hierarchy in the
same way…. Take an example: just because I loved Dostoevsky
didn’t mean that I couldn’t love Bruce Springsteen. Now, if
are all sorts of modernist dogmas in architecture, which came to
prevail not only because of their aesthetic values. There was a
material support for these ideas: it’s cheaper to build
buildings this way. Anyway, when the term postmodernism began to
be used across the field for all the arts it became inflated.
Indeed, many writers who used to be called modern or modernist
are now called postmodern because they recycle, use
quotations–I’m thinking of Donald Barthelme, for instance–or
practice what’s called intertextuality.
Van Gogh and Warhol are treated as equivalent by Jameson for the
sake of theory-building, for fitting examples into his theory.
That’s when I get off the bus. In my view, what’s called
postmodernism–that is, the making everything equivalent–is the
perfect ideology for consumerist capitalism. It is an idea of
accumulation, of preparing people for their shopping
Baudrillard is a political idiot. Maybe a moral idiot, too.
If I ever had any thought about functioning in a typical way as
a public intellectual, my experiences in Sarajevo would have
cured me forever. Look, I did not go to Sarajevo in order to
stage Waiting for Godot. I would have had to have been insane to
do such a thing. I went to Sarajevo because my son, a journalist
who had begun covering the war, suggested that I make such a
trip. While there for the first time in April 1993, I told
people I would like to come back and work in the besieged city.
When asked what I could do, I said: I can type, I can do
elementary hospital tasks, I can teach English, I know how to
make films and direct plays. “Oh,” they said, “do a play. There
are so many actors here with nothing to do.” And the choice of
doing Godot was made in consultation with the theater community
in Sarajevo.
years. The play took two months. I doubt if Baudrillard knows
how long I was in Sarajevo. I’m not a Bernard-Henri Levy making
his documentary Bosna. In France they call him BHL; in Sarajevo
they called him DHS–deux heures a Sarajevo–two hours in
Sarajevo. He came in the morning on a French mlitary plane, left
his film crew, and was out of there in the afternoon. They
concrete reality! I’m for complexity and the respect for
reality. I don’t want to think anything theoretically in that
sense. My interest is to understand the genealogy of ideas. If
I’m against interpretation, I’m not against interpretation as
such, because all thinking is interpretation. I’m actually
against reductive interpretation, and I’m against facile
transposition and the making of cheap equivalences.
in California. We stood at street corners and twice were stoned
