Re: [-empyre-] Baudrillard and the future of theory

["McKenzie Wark" <mckenzie.wark@gmail.com>]

On 3/10/07, Brian Holmes <brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr> wrote:

>  the very salable repetition of the same  gesture just fed the whole
> complacent 80s moment and created cascades of
> mediocre imitators who made intellectual and cultural life in the
> "postmodern" USA into something very stifling and small and
> narcissistic...

If we were to hold all theorists accountable for their epigones, who
would we have left? That the gesture sold well i won't hold against
him (or Sylvere, who sold it). Good luck to anyone who can make a
living at 'theory'. That the gesture was repeated i take to be an
aesthetic choice, a kind of minimalism. But the 'take away' is that
there can be an aesthetic to theoretical writing. It need not all have
the 'tone jam' and 'frame lock' quality as Charles Bernstein describes
it.


> What later surprised me and made me, not really forgive, but rather just
> forget Baudrillard's role in all that, was that immediately after
> September 11 he abandoned that single strategy and started talking about
> life again:

I chanced to be on stage twice when he did this, once in Paris and
again for a much bigger show at the New School. And i agree. I did not
read all those books he did in the 90s and early 00s. But at the end,
here was a new development, or perhaps a new correspondence between
the possible world of thought and some other world.

___________________
McKenzie Wark
http://www.ludiccrew.org