Ben Smith at Scripture and Cities on Ellul and Baudrillard got me thinking about Ellul's observation that the last few centuries have had the left formulating myths that have been co-opted and redefined by reactionary or conservative or establishment groups

I haven't gotten to Baudrillard but I've read about his work in some of David Roberts' books on the total work of art in European modernism.  I've debated whether to try tackling Baudrillard, Malraux, Lyotard, and some of the other continental philosophers.  I did tackle a small portion of Gadamar's Truth and Method ... .  But I have read a few books by Ellul and so this observation from Smith didn't hit me out of the blue:


https://scriptureandcities.blogspot.com/2020/01/on-baudrillard.html
In my ongoing quest to resource the theory of the radical left for the conservative/orthodox church, I've been reading a few things by the late French theorist Jean Baudrillard: the collection of extracts from 1969-83 called The Revenge of the Crystal, his most famous work from 1981, Simulacra and Simulation, and the travelogue-of-sorts America from 1986. Widely known as 'the high priest of postmodernism', I was intrigued to read him because of my fascination with the power of images in our society, which was ultimately his central preoccupation. The sole reference to Baudrillard in Ellul's The Humiliation of the Word is very favourable (more-or-less 'read all his books') so that added to my interest.

Still inching my way through The Humiliation of the Word, well, sort of taking a break from it now that I'm halfway through it but Humiliation is a companion book to The Empire of Non-Sense, which I've read in full.  I may just get around to Baudrillard but later.  

I'm wondering about the specific wording of "to resource the theory of the radical left for the conservative/orthodox church" because that wording reminded me of something that Ellul wrote, I think, in The New Demons, about how most of the grand myths in Western thought and politics in the last few centuries were formulated by people on the left or in the liberal/progressive wing of Western thought and that these myths, such as liberty or equality or fraternity were initially rejected by reactionary and conservative groups who eventually co-opt and in many respects significantly redefine those myths.  Conservatives in the 1700s who might have rejected the deistic and semi-Pelagian or unitarian elements of American revolutionary figures don't seem to figure prominently in contemporary evangelical or conservative accounts of the Founding Fathers.  That Metaxas has attempted to present Bonhoeffer, of all people, as basically congruent with any kind of evangelical Protestant anything is a surprise.  Thirty years ago I recall evangelicals regarding Bonhoeffer with suspicion at best.  

Perhaps the most vivid example of the ways in which arguments made by someone on the left got transformed into an argument from the right, in the realm of aesthetics and the arts, that springs to mind for me lately is the way Theodor Adorno's criticism of popular music was mirrored, minus Adorno's Marxism, in Roger Scruton's writing on music.  I've discussed that here and here. I think both Adorno and Scruton were ultimately wrong but the case for why they were wrong is part of a larger project that's called Ragtime and Sonata Forms I've been incubating in the last couple of years and that's neither here nor there for the current post, I guess.

Anyway ... on to the next passage that stuck with me at Scripture and Cities:

https://scriptureandcities.blogspot.com/2020/01/ellul-and-baudrillard.html

...
Ellul's description of the image's effect certainly sounds a lot like Baudrillard's concept of hyperreality: 'Sight permits a representation of reality that is accepted as reality and identified with it. Images become unquestionable, just as reality is. This happens because images become more real than reality itself' (p.116); '...this "reality" is really fiction - literally simulated, depicted' (p.228). Both Humiliation and Simulacra and Simulation were originally published in 1981, so it seems unlikely that Ellul got these ideas directly from Baudrillard. Interestingly, both works also discuss icons in not dissimilar ways as images which seek to simulate the divine for their users, although Ellul then goes on to make a value judgement by suggesting that devotional use (rather than background, 'signpost' use) of icons will always be idolatrous.

They're even not that far apart in denigrating 'reality' as something of dubious value or utility. If you can look past the occasional bad language, this fellow's summaries of many of Baudrillard's books and essays are excellent. By listening to his expositions of The Evil Demon of Images and the later The Perfect Crime, I've hopefully clarified Baudrillard's use of 'reality'. Contrary to what some might assume, he didn't believe simply in a 'real' or 'authentic' world distorted or falsified by images: it seems he argued that 'the real' is always a simulated illusion as that which is filtered through the human mind, language, and artwork, a primary reality which images then take as the material for their own simulated hyperreality.

In this way there is no 'getting back to nature', a concept that is embedded within a web of illusory bifurcations and constructions. This is probably what would classify Baudrillard as postmodern rather than modern. He attempts to construct some kind of guidance for action in dividing simulations into those that are oppressive and those that aren't, but I think that begs the question as to why, within his framework, the non-oppressive forms of simulation are neccessarily 'better' than the oppressive, a question someone like theorist of nihilist-capitalism Nick Land would push hard. Into the category of oppressive simulations of reality Baudrillard groups the entirety of globalised technological/scientific civilization, painting it as a totalising reality that can bear no dissent in a way comparable to Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment.
...

Whether it's Scruton's transformation of the arguments against pop songs by Adorno or a Brad East at Mere Orthodoxy arguing why Christians should refrain from consuming pop culture it can seem as though there's a pattern in which conservatives take up arguments that were made in a previous century by people of the left but redefined in such a way as to remove whatever is "left" about them. 

That the alt-right or conservatives are now seeing themselves as defending the liberal Western traditions that, two and three centuries ago their social/historical equivalents would have opposed isn't even ironic, it may simply be what Ellul described as what has been happening in the West since the era of modernism (i.e. the last few centuries).