File spoon-archives/baudrillard.archive/baudrillard_1997/97-04-26.234, message 7


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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