Date: Fri, 08 Nov 1996 18:48:37 +0000
From: "steve.devos" <steve.devos-AT-dial.pipex.com>
Subject: Re: Baudrillard and Foucault


Good to see the list back after the summer....

Baudrillard and Foucault:

Foucault was at his most concrete as a historian of ideas, discourse and
in some sense or other of the actions of the social on the body. The
problem with Foucault is not with his work itself, nor with some
disscussion of whether he is a modernist - great thinker or
post-modernist - but rather as Baudrillard discusses somewhere or other
- the extent to which his texts , discourses have faded into a
simulation of themselves as `he’ has collected followers and disciples.
It is the great tragedy of  this generation of French intellectuals that
they bred followers. The Foucault text has become an unfortunate
simiulcra of itself.

The problem with Foucault as discourse isn’t that his ideas don’t work -
(for who can judge this in an email ) - but rather that it doesn’t work
as a description and definition of  contemporary everyday life in europe
and the west generally.  - a case study worth considering I would
suggest is the discourse of contemporary politics with its use of
“polling, focus groups etc” that never reflect peoples needs. But they
enable clinton and soon blair to get elected,  to control their empty
elite centred political discourse reflecting a perculiar nihalism from
the political centre.  But Foucault would I suspect, discuss this in
terms of polling as an all pervading discourse of power, discipline and
social control - which almost works.

Baudrillard would propose that polling and related elements, including
the media, function to destroy the symbolic elements and meaning of
politics. That they create an empty feedback loop feeding, from the
nihalistic emptiness of the masses, out of a profound dissatisfaction,
back into the system and in the process creating an inability to do or
say anything. A simulation of  politics within which the politicians,
the media and the pollsters believe they are manipulating the situation.

Baudrillard functions as a perfect moralist - in some sense he seems to
be attempting to produce an ethic for the understanding the
un-understandable modern world - (I know people on the list are
currently saying post-modern but I’m not sure it fits Baudrillard). This
is especially true of the texts Symbolic Exchange and Death and even
more so of The Perfect Crime....

Foucault plainly believes in the intelligibility of the world - but only
in terms of the specific intellectual - he marks the historical moment
where intellectuals admit that  - they know very little about a subject
and that their opinion  has no more value than anyone elses - But
Baudrillard would probably propose it in terms of `the perpetual
illusion of an ungraspable object and the subject who believes he grasps
it ...’ p14-p15  The Perfect Crime. Always the death of,  the
destruction of the symbolic and its replacement by circulation,
illusion, without visable objectives other than circulation...

The Perfect Crime - good on science, technology, cinema etc...

Sorry for the length  - any lack of clarity is due to having written
this on the underground/subway earlier....

steve.devos