From: "marcos ramirez lavandero" <mrlavandero-AT-yunque.com>
Subject: Re: The list alive
Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2003 19:26:50 -0400


originality?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Aris Mousoutzanis" <emous01-AT-students.bbk.ac.uk>
To: <baudrillard-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Saturday, December 21, 2002 3:44 PM
Subject: Re: The list alive


> Kenneth, thanks for your very interesting comments.
>
> > Baudrillard falls out of favor for his 'hasty generalizations' and his
> > 'overstatements', despite, as other posters have mentioned, the utter
> > obviousness of said overstatements.  On the one hand, we disagree; on
> > the other, we agree too much.  Maybe this is some sort of critical
> > strike to go along with the (non-existent) event strike?
>
> Well, this is precisely what I meant when I said that I didn't find his
SOT and
> his latest work very interesting.  Personally I don't see a contradiction
in
> the fact that one makes overstatements who are all too obvious.  And
> why 'baudrillardise' this situation and call it a critical strike
(especially
> when so many interesting critical studies emerge in many areas of theory,
> otherwise why bother even using to this list!), instead of saying that
> basically there seems to be some problem with the originality of B's
thought
> anymore?  To speak of a critical strike might even be dangerous, in the
sense
> that it might discourage people to keep thinking and meditating on
whatever
> happens around them.
>
> > should be honest: different listserv members often have opinions that
> > seem like polar opposites, and of course, it helps if we reduce the
> > content of an entire essay to a few sentences here and there.
>
> Obviously, it is impossible to quote an entire paper in a list, but you
are
> right when you say that pointing at some decontextualised phrases might be
> reductive.  But I think that it is specific points here and there that we
find
> problematic in a work and this is why we talk about them in the first
place,
> this is why lists such as this one exist.
>
> > Fun and games aside, the 90s were eventless to the industrial west, and
> > it is within (and against, in a literal sense) that scene that
> > Baudrillard finds himself.
>
> But this is one of the points that I think must be emphasised, and this is
an
> aspect of B and pomo in general that needs to be re-examined - the fact
that it
> is such a Western movement, while making grand claims about various
aspects of
> contemporary experience that affect and relate to the entire globe.  I
think
> that this is something that should be emphasised in discussions on
> postmodernism and Baudrillard.
>
> Are these events?  To
> > the people involved, they are reality, pure and simple (we hope, but
> > then again, which reality do we hope for?).  To those who experience
> > them vicariously, the experience is already washed clean of its
> > eventhood, just as it loses its eventuality through the real time of
> > incessant coverage and pundit speculation.  Baudrillard's critique of
> > 90s culture can never be assessed by divorcing it from its ontological
> > premise - the ubiquity of media and the role of that media in
> > constituting what we loosely refer to as the social, as culture, as the
> > political, as the aesthetic, etc etc.
>
> Yes, this is right.  But once again, I say, he's making this point
continuously
> for the last years.  I guess I like seeing things moving further, and
> personally I would like to see a stronger emphasis on the dialectic
between
> hyperreality and the 'pure and simple' reality, that it seems to me must
be
> given more attention if we want to make a coherent analysis.
>
> > The question with which we might counter, the question that Aris recalls
> > from Zizek, is a good one.  But it's answered more poorly by Zizek's
> > limited and slavish Lacanianism than it is by Baudrillard's more
> > provocative cancer/metastasis metaphor, what in The Spirit of Terrorism
> > he terms the terrorist situational transfer: any system that gets too
> > big eventually forces its components to feed off of its own mass.
>
> You are right about Zizek's tendency to find Lacan everywhere (and it is a
very
> specific kind of Lacan, a Zizekian Lacan if you want) - a problem with
> Lacanians in general I think (by the way, Friedrich Kittler comes to mind
here,
> also because the last sections of his _Gramophone, Film, Typewriter_
directly
> relate to the embrace of war and technology).  Many times I get a bit
tired of
> Zizek's writings, which is the reason why I liked his _Welcome to the
Desert of
> the Real_, because I didn't find such a degree of slavishness to Lacan,
and I
> thought his combination of theory (not just Lacan) with concrete examples
> (particular political statements, references to newspapers, tv shows etc.)
was
> very successful.  On the other hand, once again, Baudrillard has been
using
> cancerous imagery and this kind of approach for the last decade at least.
If I
> read Baudrillard and I like him and I adopt his views, I can find these
> processes at these events myself and apply his already made arguments onto
> them, I don't need him to tell these to me himself.
>
> I know I may sound a bit too harsh on him, but it's just that I like being
> critical to things that I like - and I do like his thought and consider
him an
> important theorist of the late twentieth century - but so far, not of the
early
> twentieth-first.
>
> Best regards
> Aris
>
>
>
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