From: jcharles-AT-computer.org
Date: Tue, 20 Jun 95 13:50:13 est
Subject: Re[2]: SHADOW: the silence of the majorities


     "...The hyper-critical, radical, individual sensibility no longer 
     exists.  Events are the most radical things today.  Everything which 
     happens today is radical.  There's a great wealth of radical events, 
     and all one needs to do is to enter into its interplay.  Nowadays, 
     reality is radical.  Reality is Situationist, not us!" (170)

Could someone briefly explain what B. means here?

jc 

______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Re: SHADOW: the silence of the majorities
Author:  baudrillard-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu at INTERNET
Date:    6/20/95 12:43 PM


W Ted Rogers writes:
>
> If Baudrillard is truly
>a situationist, has he abandoned this situationist telos of a revolution? 
>As a corollary, does the suicide of Guy Debord (the principal situationist 
>theorist) mean that he [Debord] agreed? And, what of "fatal strategies" as 
>a method to destroy the system by driving it into a hyperlogical implosion? 
>Or, is it possible that what is criticised as nihilism in Baudrillard's 
>thought (cf. Kellner, et al) is being misunderstood (cf. Gane)?
>
     
Just a snippet from an interview reprinted in Gane's _Baudrillard 
Live_--B. has spoken to his relationship with Situationism quite a 
number of times but this one seems to answer to the questions posed 
above:
     
"Of course, today, the real terrorists are not so much us, as the 
events around us.  Situationist modes of radicalism have passed into 
things and into situations.  Indeed, there's no need now for 
Situationism, Debord, and so on.  In a sense, all that is out of 
date.
     
Elsewhere in the Gane collection, or perhaps somewhere else, I can't 
remember, B. speaks of himself as something of an heir or successor to 
Situationism, but *not* simply as a Situationist ala the SI in
the mid 60s.  I imagine B. might chuckle at the notion of being "truly 
[!!] a situationist".
     
Tristan
*********************************************************************** 
The most amusing feature of this history, the ironic thing about the 
end, is that communism should have collapsed exactly as Marx had 
foreseen for capitalism, with the same suddenness, and, ultimately, 
with such ease that it did not even strike the imagination.  The
fact that he got the victor wrong in no way detracts from the 
exactness of Marx's analysis; it merely adds the objective irony 
which was lacking.  Fate took care of that.  It is as though some 
evil genie had substituted the one for the other--communism for 
capitalism--at the last moment.  
                     Baudrillard
***********************************************************************


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