File spoon-archives/baudrillard.archive/baudrillard_1998/baudrillard.9802, message 75


Date: Fri, 27 Feb 1998 11:02:41 -0800
From: evan-AT-steammedia.com (Evan Leeson)
Subject: Re: A possible "sellout"?


>> The perfect crime has no victim.
>>
>> Herein lies the crux: you and I could go on debating what the "real"
>> essence of the fence is and where it night be found. We could establish a
>> whole range of criteria and tests. But is it not the case that the concept
>> is absurd to start with? Plato said there are ideal forms and then the
>> objects we come into contact with. The real existed in the idea. The idea
>> could be achieved in your head. This was "the true" and "the real". Varying
>> forms of this existed up until the day a someone said that the opposite was
>> true - that the real and the true were out there and the lie was in your
>> head. In your head you could only be sure that you existed. Everything else
>> was suspect without proper method to discover it's "reality". All discourse
>> hitherto has proceded with the epistemological weapon of "faulty
>> perception" at hand. Then came the idea that we might never actually get to
>> the real because it's always tainted by perception and the involvement of a
>> subject (solipsism, the Heisenberg Principle, etc.). There is in fact, no
>> such thing-for-us as an independent reality. Yet all around us we continue
>> to pretend that there is, just as we continue to pretend that space and
>> time are actual, static measuring tools. Our rhetoric, politics, science,
>> etc. still operates as if we were referring to a real and acting on the
>> basis of it. A frantic clinging to and accelleration of the "production of
>> the real" to shore up our shattered foundation and blind our already blind
>> eye. We await (or not) the revaluation that will replace these fundamental
>> terms and concepts with a new episteme.
>
>Evan,
>
>I don't think we disagree on anything, but this damn nostalgic longing for
>the real...
>it's so hard to leave behind. The problem is that many of us remain caught
>in the same
>trap as the early Nietzsche, who knew perfectly well that our perceptions
>are by and
>large products of the human head and that we cannot cut off this head and
>still
>perceive, yet "the question nonetheless remains what of the world would
>still be there
>if one had cut it off" (Human, all..., 9).
>We could go on searching for the real to the end of time, and if someone
>came across it,
>it would "disintegrate immidiately upon contact, like mummies in the open
>air." (Sim &
>Sim, p. 7). The moment of victory is the moment of the greatest loss, as
>Zizek says
>(paraphrasing Hegel).
>
>>
>> Baudrillard describes this situation as "ecstatic". This is becasue we have
>> been reunited with our alienated selves. We alienated ourselves from the
>> world with Plato and we alienated the world from ourselves with Descartes.
>> In today's world we have erased the signified (that from which we were
>> alienated) and are living only with signifiers. We are reunited. We are
>> whole. We are ectstatic.
>>
>
>Are we living only with signifiers?. Baudrillard seems to disagree. In
>"The Perfect
>Crime", he writes that the "supply of floating signifiers has fallen to
>dangerous
>levels" (p. 49). This is a great statement, because it runs direct counter
>to the
>popular conception of postmodernity. All these prophets of postmodernity -
>they fill us
>with crap. They tell us that postmodernity offers the ultimate freedom.
>They tell us
>that everything is up for grabs. The trancendental signifieds are gone.
>People have
>retained the voice that was seized by metaphysics, religion and science during
>modernity. Bulshitt. In S/Z, Barthes talks about readerly and writerly
>texts. The
>writerly text consists of "a galaxy of signifiers" forcing the reader to
>write the text
>(correlate signifiers with contingent signifieds) while reading it.
>Hyperreality is NOT
>a writerly text. Decisions made on the basis of reflection have been
>eradicated. Only
>pseudo-decisions made on the basis of reflexes remain. We are living with
>zillions of
>signs (of the real). We are told everything. Nothing remains to be done.
>Apathy, not
>ecstacy

I guess I've confused the issue with my bad semiotics. A sign is the unity
of the signifier and signified, correct? In the type of analysis done by
Barthes, Baudrillard and others, one could say there are two types of
objects-as-signs - transitive and intransitive. Barthes would argue that
these signs are initially transitive, acrue intransitive elements and then
return to a transitive state carrying the intransitive into reification.
This implies that you could crack it and apply critique - expose the
ideological nature or components of the sign.  Baudrillard kind of flips
this. He argues there never is original transitive content in the sign and
that all signs begin as intransitive. When the content of the sign is
contested, ideological discourse kicks in. Only then does the pretense of
transitive content arise. For a long time we behaved _as if_ the former
were true. In hyperreality there is no longer any pretense of original
transitive content. Operational simulation involves the arbitrary assembly
of systems of signs with purely intransitive content - and no apology is
necessary. We play in the wreckage that remains after all transitive
content is abandoned. But it is wreckage only if you long for the
transitive - for the lost original objective signified. This is critique
"classic" hanging on and trying to push reality "classic" back at us.
Ecstasy is the belonging - the being-in-the-world of the intransitive which
is not intransitive because the diad has collapsed.

 Ecstasy is not a positive term used this way. No distance, no seduction,
no challenge (another current thread on the list). This is different from
apathy in that with apathy you must still be aware of the bogus association
of a signifier and signified and choose not to do anything about it. This
is why I think ecstasy is a better word than apathy in this case. What I
see Baudrillard and other like him saying is that the critique of Barthes
and others - namely the takng aim at the intransitive and exposing it's
ideological roots - requires a ideological foundation of it's own that is
characterised as transitive. You cannot say something is ideological
without presupposing access to the "real". This comes back to our original
debate about the status of the real in Baudrillard's work. How can you
re-envision critique without making this appeal?

best

evan




   

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