Date: Mon, 23 May 1994 18:38:41 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: the word-producing industry
To: baudrillard-AT-world.std.com
Cc: baudrillard-AT-world.std.com




On Mon, 23 May 1994 BALDWINE-AT-steffi.uncg.edu wrote:

> Should we, as academics, just give up, play word games, give in to the
> cheesiest of cheesy seductions, or try to engage in discourse
> about value and ethics?

I'm not sure what is meant by "giving in" to a seduction, but we can hold 
that thought for a while.  I think we always engage in discourses about 
value and ethics.  I think to open one's mouth is to enter the ethical 
matrix.  And while I am annoyed at people who insist on incessant 
playing, that position is in itself an ethical stance (or it can be). 
So I guess I don't want to give up on the idea of play.  I think that, in 
some sense, play is a limited form of resistance, a refusal to engage the 
philosophy/ethics/value combine on its own terms--a variation on the silence 
Baudrillard writes about.  But of course, most of the people who do this 
(instead of silence) are intimate with that very set of discourses.  A 
sandbox for the epistemologically elite.