From: Mark   Nunes <mnunes-AT-dekalb.dc.peachnet.edu>
Subject: Revolution
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 1995 11:05:47 -0400 (EDT)


> 
> I too would echo Douglas Brown's questions regarding revolution. Is
> Baudrillard positing a nihilistic cul-de-sac or does he allow for some
> way out, be it revolution or ...? 
> Ted

"The political and the social scenes have become banal. Basically all 
there is to do is to watch the extension, the adaptation, generalized 
reconversion of all those things. . . .It seems that the paralysing 
apparatus of the political, the revolutionary form, now and in the 
future, is decisively weaked, eroded, and the centres of interest can 
slide onto things which will never be in the foreground. Political 
ideology, be it on the right or on the left, will continue all the same 
to be in the foreground, although a false foreground--as a system of 
simulation. Today it is no longer worth doing a critique of politics. 
Let's go somewhere else, to see what is going on elsewhere."
						(_Baudrillard Live_, 66)

Elsewere B. talks about the European "dialectic between conservation and 
revolution" vs. the American (postmodern) mutation: a zero point, an 
implosion, a mobile space of the transpolitical.

Polemical/ideological revolution no longer makes sense. In fact, 
"revolution" functions as a strategy of deferral, a "paralyzing 
apparatus" of the political. I'm reminded of B.'s heat with feminism and 
his arguments against polemics (in favor of strategies of seduction: "a 
mastery not of power relations but another type of relationship") In this 
sense I think B. can be politically and socially subversive--can offer 
derailment rather than resistance--but I don't know if I can call him 
revolutionary.

I see another strategy at work here too, one that addresses self, identity, 
our own assumptions---but I'm saving that for later.

--mark

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