Interestingly, the question of "What is to be done?" was asked on this
list only on January, and it was a productively unintelligible parsing
of the problem of the future of theory. What would Baudrillard
appreciate more? If we had that conversation again this month or if we
just used one of the common cultural writing operations of our time and
simply copied and pasted last month's conversation?
In any case, I will just give a quick story of thanks to the great
philosopher. I read Baudrillard for the first time in the late 1980's
when I was a young film student. I had been making typical undergraduate
short narratives, and writing about semiotics in horror and film noir,
both of which were nominal kinds of work for undergraduates at San
Francisco State at the time. But after reading Simulacra and Simulation,
I made a short student film in which Alan Ginsberg's poem Howl, (one of
the only poems I actually like and which is of course is also sacred
text of the United States left) was read over a montage of shots I took
from newspaper and drug store sale advertisements. Shampoo, underarm
deodorants, toothpaste... I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed...
During critique, it was a bit scandalous. My peers hated it and refused
me polite applause as a passive-aggressive insult, which is about as
spirited as young American students were capable of being at the time.
And the professor questioned it harshly as well, but he understood (I
think) that he was in part responsible (and a good teacher) for having
assigned the Baudrillard reading in the first place. Nevertheless,
perhaps for my transgression of the words of the great poet, (or perhaps
because my crappy super-8 footage on expired film was not exposed very
well), I earned a very low grade. (Which I was used to anyway!) But for
the first time in my life, I felt like I had made a successful artwork.