Date: Tue, 3 Dec 96 01:48:31 +0200 From: Nikos Gousgounis <ngousg-AT-itel.gr> Subject: Baudrillard's hermeneutics Omar and all 1/ Yes, I insist that our actual lives are much more artificial under present circumstances as they used to be 20 years ago. The reasons are multiple : a/ the decline of the importance of the notion of the social classes as substituted by various cultural trends that are fragmented. There are also many sources of differentation today much more important than social class ( gender, ethnicity,age ) But the cultural trends became recently crucial : aestheticization of everyday life and narcissism, fragmented identity, new dimensions of time and space because of technological and communication innovations. I think that Culture has ''won''traditional societal forms and the importance of urban influence is evident : The type of cultural values our postmodern cities are producing is prtopaged directly to the rest of the non urban World in an immediate way by the means of mass media. Consequently the inhabitants of non urbanized places, consider these values as powerful and they tend to imitate them ''be traying'' by this attitude their traditinal values and life-styles that had been more friendly to the Nature ..as natural. The way hat these inha- bitants of the periphery consume reminds babies' imitation to the acts and behaviors of adults. Urban and post industrial ( post Fordist too ) way of life is seen as the only powerful expression of maturity. I don't know any journalists who pass provincial values being installed in the periphery themselves. They reflect the styles and fashions of their ''encultuated colleagues '' from the Center. The vision of the periphe- ry thus, to the eyes of the ''dominant urban spectator''is artificial and takes the dimensions of a vulgar folklorism. The way that media present to our audiences agriculturer's demonstrations is different >from the analogue protests and strikes of workers and various profes- sional classes of the cities. They have to be wild people with strange habits, speaking as barbarians to the cameras etc. They seem not to have right to the intelectuality. The division is very clear : Rude hand craftsmen who stay close to the Nature - they can serve as providers of food or touristic servants during the summer- and the intellectuals >from the Center who govern and dominate by virtual means through the production and propagation of various forms of information . I consider that B. is absolutely right when signalising from early seventies the artificiality of urban signs that transcript reality and substitute all former means of communication ( mainly traditional symbols) . In his early work of 1972 :'' The political economy of the Sign'' he is describing and forecasting the evolution of Reality to the year 2000. He is not forecasting events as .....Nostradamus but social trends and he suceeds. The direction to which technology is leading our social lives is predicted fairly well. 2/ Using the term ''sub-realities'' I want to point out the terrific fragmentation that dominates our lives. It is proved that if simulation is the source of actual social alienation and the confusion due to the refusal of the OTHER, fragmentation is the little sister of simulation hel- ping in its way the dissolution of meanings. To take the style of our actual advertisments using mainly visual tricks to ''seduce''telespec- tators, their virtual illusion could not be successful if not fragmented . MTV style using video-clips results to the absolute extermination of any possible meaning. If this style succeeds to pedagogise the masses and especially Youth, then the statement that we live in the era of no ideologies can be transformed by the end of meanings. Post modernism will be proved in the History of Globe as the only era that permit to human individuals to survive in material terms but with no use of intellectual meanings. Culture and education are massive as addresed to the masses , but with no meaning too. B. is not leftish or Marxist anymore after 1968 and his critique is not addressed especially to capitalism since the differences pointed out by Marxism between free market and ownership against state so- cialism was not considered as so important for him. History proved that he was right after the collapse of eastern Socialism. Today , former eastern societies such as Poland or Hungary are the same ...postmodern already as our western societies and this is one more proof that Economy has served as a faulse excuse for changing ( or explicating) the World. If Economy was the only factor of pro- gress or empowerment of peoples, these socities with low income would have been 50 years afar from western postmodernity. But the exaggeration of the Economical factor was a lie. The important was cultural affinity that unifie European countries. Nobody remembers today of DDR ( Eastern Gernany)7 years after its dissapeareance. These Gemans had the same culture and mentality as their western=7F compatriots and 40 years of artificial political separation could not change that even if the official ideology and economy was oppre- sive. 3/Of course it is preferable for the reasons explained above to make a society of pathetic citizens reminding partially the Orwellian 1984 and much more ( who remembers now of 1984, it's as ..last century even Perestroika was not set and Soviet Union was still the No 2 Super Power ). In this society to orientate millions of ''educated'' young people to the potential unemployment and the rest of working citizens to the era of Leisure ( 3 days of work per week) seems as the only possibility of the years to come. When I speak of targets and motivation , I still think in my old fashion of some forms of personal creativity. Well, it seems that nobody needs the eventual products of any form of creativity except that ''creativity'' that could give back to the investment twice its money ! The real value of any creation is replaced by the fetich-value ( to remember old Marx) of its finan- cial rendering. If nobody is asking for realm creations, we have to wait the transforming of all the lost human skills into ...hobbies for non working time and vacations. You ask why we cannot speak nowadays about serious ideologies. Well, what can be today serious ideology except the last reminding that is left to the panicked and frigtened citizen of postmodernism ? Xenophobia and discrimination of the Otherness and any form of difference. WHAT IS RACISM AFTER ALL ,IF NOT AN ARTIFICIAL CONSTUC TION OF THE OTHER ? 4/ I insist ( and hope to be recompensed by the future of intellectual evolution-if any-) that the return to the classics -and the grand- narratives as you name them , is the only hope for a global vision of our mad mad mad World. Yes, these narratives are the only possi- bility to actual intellectuals tired of the media trush and not intented to pass the rest of their lives collecting stamps or digging holes in their gardens as an alternative. Say it an intellectual game or challenge, this ''measurement'' with the proved values of the past remains our only measure. A sophist who was enemy of Socrates had said once: ''the measure of everything is man himself''. This phrase can be inter- pretated in different ways. Or that everything has to submit to the domination of the human factor, or that the human creature has the talent to interpretate the World after his visions and the ideas of HIS ONLY MIND. Maybe whatever passes in the World, is only whatever passes from our minds and this is the reason of so many different interpretations of the reality. Now, that reality is falsified by highly sophisticated means -for obvious reasons- the interpreatations we give are more various except if we believe the intrprations given by the media high priests who are the journalists. 5/ About Otherness( alterite) B has spoken recently a lot and in a book of 1994 : ''Figures of Otherness ''there is an interesting essay on the'' plastic surgery of the Other''( I can e-mail you the text in English it's about 13.000 bites that makes 5 pages) In French the famous term alienation is close to the ''Alterite'' all deriving from the notion of other/autre or alter in Latin. Alienation in its classical meaning as given by old Charlie Marx is of course to the loose yourself while working as a robot in the fordist production of the big boss the same as Charlie Chaplin illustrated the example in his '' Modern Times'' Well, now modernity is a ...traditional past and in our post fordist way of production the importance is not to the ownership of the means of production any more but to the various ways that technology has changed this production demanding not human robots ( there are mechanical ones now mostly in Japan) but rather multi skilled workers. Markets are segmented and trade unions are not so powerful as they used to be. The importance is to the distibution of the products more than to their production ! Alienation today is more intense during con- sumption ( of products but mostly of images) and B. argues in this text is relating Alienation with the Other as that : ''Alienation, today is to be dispossessed of the Other or to produce the Other in his .....abs- cence. What comprehension of the Other if we exterminate the Other under his physical presence , keeping only his virtual one ? ( I hope that you will not misinterprete this to the logic that I prefer to write to virtual friends my aspects than to speak with physical friends in vivo. I have the same tenstion to address to known and unknown persons and develop the same thought. You can ask me how can I know the virtual stranger ? Well, by intuition there is not place for rational explication here, but some of my virtual corresponders that I met in flesh and bones during conferences became physical non- strangers to me ) Narcissism can be more powerful under these conditions of Other's extermination and exorcism from our lives. B. argues that the parado- xal limit of Alienation is to take oneself as '' focal-point'' as an object of care, of desire , of suffering etc . When you ask if otherness is im- portant for the understanding of ourselves, this question has sense if we really do respect and invest on the Other. But if we are afraid of him or her, then we will be closed to our unnown narcissistic self ho- ping to catch the ideal type i.e. the projection of our half-self that has some characterisics of the opposite sex. Romantic poets projec- ted their feminity when searching for the ideal Lorelai and romantic ladies projected their masculinity while waiting for the horseman or Prince on the white horse. Today, Patriarchy finished , women's lib requiring for full egalisation, things are confused in the level of Youth's identity formation, and most kids discover their sexual references in their late adolescence and some of them are practically bisexual evidently because of the dramatical confusion of masculine and feminine roles as played by their confused parents.=7F 6/ The logic of sayng that ''if something is falsified I don't recognise it as real'' seems very provocative to American scholars but after me is a moral declaration. When Bourdieu says ( publicly ) that actual public opinion is not existing, he means that it is not existing under his standards that he believes as correct. If for many generations there will be a falsification of events by the media and the public opinion is just a word becuse in the reality it will be a prefabricated opinion product of collective brain washing,- serving as alibi for the groups of Power- then there will be not any Bordieu or Baudrillard to say a phrase against the accepted meaning of public opinion. I want to say that THESE KIND OF INTELLECTUALS ARE THE DIRECT PRODUCTS OF THE GIVEN SOCIETY IN WHICH THEY WERE BORN AND EDUCATED. Is it accidental that B waited to the nineties to be ''discovered'' by Anglosaxon editors and scholars ? Since the seventies Americans scholars and laymen prefered to read Toffler who was addressing to this audience that he knew very well. But B was all the time addres- sing his writings to the Parisian -not even French- audience and never dared that AMERICANS NEEDED THE COLLAPSE OF SOVIETIE TO DISCOVER HIM. About Aesthetics ( Gorki had said that that will be the Ethics of the future ) B is clear when arguing on 'Seduction'' in 1979 he analyses the morals of ''seducteur'' in a simple and clear way : Seduction is the trick of a Narcissus to transfer his image to the Other and this trick is a practice of simulation par excellence. In order to seduce the unknown Other the seducer has to be handsome and rafinated in esthetic terms. His morality is deriving from his narcissic looks and his fears are excused not as moral panic but as existencial insecurity. The seducer who is playing with gazes and looks is in eternal quest of his lost( stolen ?) identity. He is the eternal adolescent a kind of Peter Pan in the country of faulse apparences. In some way, B is desperate when KNOWING THAT SOMETHING TER- RIBLE IS HAPPENING IN THE WORLD FAR FROM OUR DECISIONS AND WE CANNOT KNOW IT. It is not lazyness of the Fin de Siecle but rather impotency. But what is really the role of the actual intellectual ? Once Sartre who refused for ideological reasons his Nobel Prize, was running in the streets demonstrating in his sixties in 1968 revolt as ....a Pro Mao activist. Today, this activity of mobilisation does changes anything in the sum of his work ? Is that important for a philosopher or even sociologist to run in the streets and attacking ignoring policemen who operate under Pavlovian dog's reflexes ? I want to say that if B succeeds even in the year 2000 to make some readers more suspective after having read his writings, then his role is executed. Marx was said to argue that his role was to change the World. He tried, he could not , he entered in the Library and wrote his books, then died having never finished the ''Capital'' and some other tried to change the World after his books. But after 80 years still the World is changing to very peculiar and unpredicted directions. M,aybe the most important task -or mission-of intellectuals is to interpretate the World in a satisfactory way. I am waiting your opinions especially on this crucial point. Well that was my ...news from inside my head, the actuality is turning around in the time I am writing that, there haver been killed and died and born thousands of people and I try to pass just some ideas to un uknown ''friend'' having just the good faith that is for some good reason. Perhaps this is my fate and the destiny of every intellectual who takes his distances from commercial profits and useless power games. Rests the famous invention of Weber as a kind of ... prize called Status or prestige or social recognition........but who cares today ........people are looking too much TV, if you not circulate your image on the screens you have no chance my friend is it n't ? Nikos
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