File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1998/deleuze-guattari.9810, message 139


Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1998 03:15:46 +0000
From: Chris <christopher.mcmahon-AT-jcu.edu.au>
Subject: Re: Weasel  and Emily:  that  punk-o-lantern smile!


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Thanks Thomas,

Maybe so. I don't know. All I was trying to say is that enlightenment humanism
still seems pretty *dominant* in my neck of the woods, still saturates the 6
o'clock news, still operates as a moral and metapysical default.

On another tack, I find Baudrillard's description of the phases of the sign
towards nihilism sort of useful.
[sic]
1. The sign is the expression of a profound mystery
2. The sign conceals a profound mystery
3. The sign conceals the fact that there is no profound mystery
4. The sign bears no relation to any mystery whatsoever. it is pure simulation

God dies a slow and painful death? Funny thing is you can find all four
"phases" mixed in together, usually do.Funny thing is you can be really haunted
by this process towards "pure simulation" (is Derrida?), or sort of sceptical
(like Lacan?), or pay not attention to it (does Foucault?), or treat it as an
object of dispassionate study (Lyotard), or laugh (LOL Baudrillard?). Pm - if
that's what its about - strikes me as a bit of a "boys' preoccupation"[?] One
thing I would be interested to hear about, tho, is what do feminists think of
postmodernity? About the movement of the sign away from *some profound
mystery*, that perhaps it never did more than veil, conceal, produce as
mystification, or never was, or still is, or might be, maybe becoming?

Don't know whether to mourn or not. Know one thing though, the exploitation of
cheap "Third World" labour is somehow tied up with the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund. Wonder what Phase of the Sign that would be? Pure
simulation, abstract global capital, money breeding with minimal respect to
commodities, decoded flows? And then there is the recoding..... Christian
Children's Fund, World Vision, Mother Theresa, "world leaders" - men of state -
making speeches, UN Peacekeeping, Lady Di and the Landmines (good name for a
pop group?), and then the heterogeneous bubbles, Snake Handers Speaking in
Toungues to UFOs having Visions of the Virgin Mary who told me to Join the
Patriotic Rifle Club and Defend My Constitutional Rights! Cognitive dissonance
Page 1 (World Vision Advertisement)/Page 2 (Starvin Marvin from South Park).
You know, I learned something today. What's that Chris? Always try to be
yourself 'cos if you try to be somebody else you just end up looking foolish.
gosh Chris, I never thought of it that way.....from now on I'm only going to be
myself. Me too. Me too.....

- Chris

Thomas 2Less wrote:

> Chris,
>
> What you so poignantly revealed is that we are living exactly in a
> post-apocolyptic age, after the accident.  It is now that we attach meaning
> where there is none as it is lost amid the wreckage of ubiquitous signs
> without referents.  An age of interminable death we thought was past with
> the explosion of flesh (the Cold War, MAD) but now death greets us from the
> inside (nanotech, wired flesh and disconnected thoughts) and implodes.
>
> Oh well, gotta go and check out Oprah!
>
> Thomas



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