My relationship to the writings of French anti-sociologist Jean Baudrillard is a strange one. I like to think of his texts as junk food for the soul. Consuming them envelopes one in a giddy, indulgent haze; upon leaving, one is left disenchanted, directionless, and just a wee bit nauseous.
I do, however, like the idea of co-opting his texts and placing them in the midst of the field of virtuality which he so morbidly analyses. In order, of course, that they may be widely consumed in "real time", forgoing the tragically modern format of the printed page. Do send commentary; we need to console each other in the face of this unfolding apocalypse (or unfortunate lack thereof) (10/30/97). email r.owen j. and in a coincidence, as b. himself puts it, that undoubtedly belongs to the charming mystery of the universe, jean baudrillard arrives in my backyard may 24-27 1999 to give a 3 part seminar.
i don't know whether to laugh, cry, or defect from the union.
"Thus consumption, which characterizes the monopolistic era, implies something quite different from a phenomenology of affluence: it signifies the passage, by its contradictions, to a mode of strategic control, of predictive anticipation, of the absorbtion of the dialectic, and of the general homeopathy of the system." (p. 126, mirror of production)
"This total reduction of the process to a single one of its terms, in which the others are only excuses (usevalue is the excuse for exchval; the referent is the excuse for the code) designates more than an evolution of the capitalist mode: it is a mutation." (129, mop)
{the only possibility remaining would be} "not the open revolt of a few, but the immense, latent defection, the endemic, masked resistance of a silent majority... Something in all men rejoices in seeing a car burn." (141, mop)
"The absence of things from themselves, the fact that they do not take place though they appear to do so, the fact that everything withdraws from itself, is the material illusion of the world. And, deep down, this remains the great riddle, the enigma which fills us with dread and from which we protect ourselves with the formal illusion of truth."
"Capital has cannibalized all negativity, that of history and that of work in a -literally- sarcastic fashion: devouring the very substance of the human being to transform it into its essence as productive being."
"The east's great weapon is no longer the H-bomb, but Chernobyl. It is the accident, the accidental virus, the virus of its own decomposition - Chernobyl, whose radioactive cloud, by crossing frontiers with far greater ease than armoured divisions, prefigured the collapse of the Wall and the progressive contamination of the Western world... It is possible, then, that the east will pass on to us this model of viral collapse" here's one for the social networks crowd (of which i am of course one):
"In any discipline whatsoever, the coded, controlled, 'objective' form of inquiry only allows for this circular kind of truth, from which the very object aimed at is excluded."well!
"All of our problems today as civilized beings originate... not in an excess of alienation, but in a disappearance of alienation in favor of a maximum transparence of subjects"well, jean, what do you think of the news?
"News is the excremental production of the event as waste; it is the current dustbin of history"but what about the environmental movement, Jean?
"We may say of the news events that they hollow out the void into which they plunge. They are intent, it seems, of one thing alone: being forgotten."
"If by offering nature the status of subject, we are offering it the same poisoned chalice as we gave to the colonized nations, we ought not to be surprised if it behaves irrationally in order to assert itself as such... there is nothing more ambiguous and perverse than a subject."Baudrillard is toying with us all, suffering us with his detatched, pessimistic balloon of thought. I sit around with lungs full of helium and talk donald duck just like the rest. But I have a crafty hypothesis that Baudrillard may be exposed as a Taoist/Native American thinker. Ponder this basically Navajo text:
"by liberating good, we also liberate evil. And this is only right: it is the rule of the symbolic game. It is the inseperability of good and evil which constitutes our true equilibrium, our true balance. We ought not to entertain the illusion that we might separate the two, that we might cultivate good and happiness in a pure state and expel evil and sorrow as wastes. That is the terroristic dream of the transparency of good , which very quickly ends in its opposite, the transparency of evil."Ah, Baudrillard, you bastard prophet you, why must you be so fucking right?!?!!?
"The only suspense which remains is that of knowing how far the world can de-realize itself without succumbing to its reality deficit, or, conversely, how far it can hyper-realize itself before succumbing to an excess of reality (total simulation)"For the morbidly interested: