Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2001 20:42:18 +0100
From: Steve Devos <steve.devos-AT-tiscali.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Hello (?)


Kenneth

Interesting - like you I dropped out of this list ages ago - the last time I really participated was during some long
discussions with John Armitage discussing the merits of Virillo against Baudrillard... I rejoined the list because of the 9/11
date and curiousity.

Regarding your considered reply comments below $$

Kenneth Rufo wrote:

> First, I have generally been dismayed by the flippant use and appreciation of Baudrillard on this list.  Ever since the
> Krokers, there's been this perverse desire to see Baudrillard as hip and happy, a kind of bubbling joviality mocking the
> seriousness with which the rest of us view the world.  And while this presence of play clearly has its purchase in some of
> Baudrillard's writings (the travel diaries are a good choice, and the comments on Reagan's teeth in _America_ is a classic
> example), there is a profound nostalgia and sadness at work in his texts as well, and it is a movement too often ignored
> by those who want only to reference Baudrillard as the trumpeteer of the simulacrum.  Steve and Salwa (hello again!) have
> both engaged this aspect of JB's writing in their recent posts, albeit from different starting points.  I would encourage
> others to do the same.  Not because of its accuracy or the correctness of our appropriation, but because the "attack on
> America" carries with it the most serious of portents.  The reality principle has been challenged in America in a manner
> unheard of since its Hollywood metamorphosis.  Baudrillard was right to say, when writing on Sarajevo, that the reality
> principle must be maintained (a descriptive rather than normative statement) and it is this maintanence that has been at
> work since the first explosion, and it is the transcendence of this maintenance that will announce itself in the seemingly
> unavoidable retaliations.  That this list dies until the onset of catastrophe is naught but ironic proof of the failure
> (read: unsustainability) of strict theoretical joviality (be it theoretical dismissal or apotheosis).  When Baudrillard's
> work becomes reduced to a constricting hipness, it is small wonder that folks like John Armitage will decry it as "tired
> postmodernism."

$$ You are correct in that Baudrillard is indeed misrepresented and misunderstood as a kind of playful postmodernist, working
endlessly through the two edged sword of irony. But he invited this upon himself with his misrepresentation of America as an
achieved utopia. Rather than as one of the  appalling failed revolutions that defined the modern period, it is his failure to
define the present except through the mirror of America, which places his theoretical perspective into this ongoing crisis. It
is the ludicrous statements about America that created a problem for a generation of European theorists.

$$ It is not the reality principle that has been challenged in America but the principle of immunity, and the penetration of
the virtual into the real. As the USA prepares to attack and invade one of the poorest places on earth probably causing a
global meltdown of the worlds economy in the process, it is essential and necessary to recognise that the virtual and the
simulcra are no less real than the actual.

$$ Postmodernism only has purchase when it is directly associated back into the economic. The "tired postmodernism" John
referred derives directly from the theoretical avoidence of recognising the economic shift from the modern period into the
postmodern period.

> But theory is as much a simulation (perhaps of a different degree) as is any televisual mimesis.  The critic engages the
> media
> as an object of reality.  The theorist replicates the media's logic.  Having no avenue of escape, Baudrillard evokes a
> sort of nostalgia (always conservative, never effective, except as a rhetorical and polemical practice) for the
> primitive.  But being aware that even his nostalgia lacks purchase on reality, Baudrillard theorizes to the death.  What
> else can one do if not saturate the simulation with its own theoretical weight?  It is in this formulation of theory as
> both essential and useless that marks the aporia of common ground between the symbolic "need" that Steve identifies and
> the "need" to deny the efficacy of sign-value that other posters seem to be hinting at.  I don't know if that means
> activism in whatever sense Steve is speaking of it, but it certainly is active.  Think of it as active nihilism if you
> like.

$$ It is incorrect to accept Baudrillard's conservative nostalgia for a time when symbolic exchange had a direct purchase on
human beings existences. Just as it is incorrect to suggest that a mediated experience of an event is in some sense something
to be suspicious of, that the 'efficacy of the sign-value' should be regarded negatively, rather than something to be worked
on and with. After all we all have to coexist with our distinct versions of the social imaginary...

> Third, I have long thought that the greatest disservice to Baudrillard has been done by those who engage him at the level
> of abstraction.  The "attack" is a case in point.  Here we have a concrete instance, an exigency large enough to prompt a
> flurry of fingers for a listserv long since dormant.  Yet the easy trick (read: easy escape) is to speak in terms of broad
> policy guidelines, to compare to past entertainments (a word which ironically enough comes from the french for "to hold
> together"), or to deny (even if only as provokation) the existence of the event that prompts the reaction.  Simulation has
> never been about the absence of existence but about the absence of the real--everywhere existence encountered only by
> ascending mediation and the production of meaning.  I think the more productive application of Baudrillard requires that
> kind of "radical materiality" that Michael Calvin McGee has talked about--a massive appreciation for the contextual, for
> the intersection of the anecdotal and the anstract that occurs in the realm of mediation.  Not an appreciation for the
> material conditions (being themselves a model of the real) but rather for the different channels of meaning that go into
> constructing/constituting the event as an event.

$$ How does relate to the necessity to work on and againgst the G8 version of globalism? To go beyond the constant perhaps now
nostalgic desire for the 'absence of the real' which the USA and the G8 ran into last week and to suggest that the material
conditions are directly relevant and do penetrate mediation and meaning. Mediation and simulation are yesterday's illusions.
Next time it won't be the symbolic act of aggression against the WTC but Three Mile Island...

> Steve is wrong to think the world is anti-intellectual; the world seems fine with intellectualism to me--it's the
> intellectuals who seem to have a problem with it.

$$ History Kenneth does not support you - as the postmodern resurgence of evangelicalism, the globalisation of dominant
industrial cultural production would suggest.

>  The symbolic haunts our signification just as much as it haunts the
> media, but we claim the mass's ignorance (rather than indifference) of it and so resign ourselves to play with it.

$$ Indifference, perhaps, the question is always how you engage people or at the least persuede them to not act from a
reactionary perspective - how many muslims have been attacked this week due to the events, mediated or not?

> Zizek's
> recent "welcome to the desert" offers some insight; there may be no better time for a serious theory to really have a
> chance to play.

$$ Yes I like the Zizek piece as well - heartfelt...

Still I am enjoying the sight of the USA leaning on Israel...

regards

sdv