Date: Fri, 13 Feb 1998 11:41:03 -0500 (EST)
From: mnunes-AT-dekalb.dc.peachnet.edu
Subject: Re: putain de simulacre


> I think it's quite interesting that this list has "descended" into 
> obscenity and flames, for is this not, perhaps, the ultimate end of 

Hey, at least there's action. Being the "co-moderator" of this list (or 
simulation thereof) has been quite lonely at times.

> Baudrillard's oeuvre as one great obscenity, blurted out in response to 

I like that image, and I'm reminded of the piece at the end of "Order of 
Simulacra (not the semiotexte version--the chapter in Symbolic Exchange 
and Death), in which Baudrillard writes on graffiti as a kind of 
obscenity shouted across the city. There's a kind of function to the 
symbolic in early Baudrillard--a term that he drops, but which re-emerges 
in the notion of "stake" or "challenge." Elsewhere in Symbolic Echange 
and Death he writes:
	We must therefore displace everything into the sphere of the
	symbolic, where challenge, reversal and overbidding are the
	law, *so that we can respond to death only by an equal or
	superior death....To defy the system with a gift to which it
	cannot respond save by its own collapse and death.*
Obscenity and flames, like graffiti, can be a kind of unreturnable gift 
(and maybe more fittingly of the order of potlatch). The question, in 
part, would be to whom we offer such a gift. This brings me to the second 
part of Joshua post:

> is actually quite the reactionary, entrenched in tradition (but in France 
> you can't escape that, which is maybe what has turned the traditional, 
> restrictive French academic system into the manufacturer of our centuries 

How reactionary *is* this approach? Joshua and I exchanged some ideas a 
few years back on the femininst critique of Baudrillard--that he refuses 
strategies of resistance because they are functioning within a discourse 
that is no longer valid ("That is why the only strategy is 
*catastrophic*, and not dialectical at all. things must be pushed to the 
limit, where quite naturally they collapse and are inverted" SE&D). It 
takes into account as well his break with Marxism & the pc in france. Can 
we think of this strategy as *reactionary*? It would be worthy of further 
discussion.

Fully expecting a response of silence,

--mark