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

[Aliette <aliette@criticalsecret.org>]

Ken may be yet sleeping, and from evidence Nicholas not being online, I
answer,

On 11/03/07 2:21, "Brian Holmes" <brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr> probably wrote:

> 
> 
> McKenzie Wark wrote:
> 
>> That review of mine of the Gulf War Did Not Take Place was written
>> before I read Symbolic Exchange and Death, and hence i did not really
>> understand the writerly strategy JB employed, there and elsewhere, the
>> return of the gift of the world unreality to itself, measure for
>> measure. Hence I was quite wrong to call this strategy 'critical' in
>> so uncritical a way.
> 
> Personally I found the endless repetition of that strategy really
> infuriating, not because I didn't understand the idea of giving the
> world's unreality back to it, not because I didn't have an inkling of
> all the collective projects on the radical left whose failure such
> sublime irony had to make at once palpable, bearable and yet virulent
> still - but instead because 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, even on into the mid and late 90s when there were really a
> lot of things happening in the wide world that were worth paying
> attention to.

I cannot know it, but from another hand it would be possible to consider
that A Hacker manifesto and may be Ken's following Gamer theory are in a
sort books such as the free style of Baudrillard in philosophy which he
opened for others. I do not tell of aphorisms what is not specially
Baudrillardian, but the writing itself which is very free style at Ken's
book, more the system of integration of the diachronic quotations and
references into the proper narration, more the composition from article to
article repeating proper objects under changing views of the chapters it is
to say changing views respecting the concepts - keywords- of the chapters.
Which looks like a performance. It comes from all other sources of
inspiration that we know. But the very question is the essay as free style.

Not the free style as manierism but the free style because what is to be
said cannot be said currently but represented. Essay does not deliver
representation, it creates both the thought from the style as the thought
equalizing the style itself. That is a continental tradition in philosophy.
Intelligibility is not really the question of continental philosophy but the
concepts as generative systems. Intelligibility is the very, discrimant
question of analytic philosophy.

Well I do not deny the interest of empirism, for example, but what it can
create if it does not integrate the rhetoric figures of invention as proper
objects ? I imagine that integrate empirism and essay begins to be a very
interesting experiment that produce something new - something different.
Specially metapolitic objects of integration. There is yet in a sort
semiotical machines, but they are in request of utility, of application;
what it cannot be generative of collective creation, but manipulation.

The thought cannot be thought more useful. It only can be thought and
utility is another sphere. If you do not create something new you represent
what you actualize, and at the moment you represent, the fragile atopy fails

If it was not creative it would be impossible for me as former ML-activist
and for Baudrillard himself as former ML-activist to read again the sort of
texts we had yet read and rejected in our time -- exactly the problem of the
first translation that Baudrilard rejected. But returning to the Anglophone
text after having read and approve our second version.


> 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: first what was behind the attack on the Twin Towers, then a
> strong insight into the struggle of the intermittents du spectacle, as
> well as other short but very thoughtful texts, published in the
> newspaper Liberation. I frankly think he wasted most of his time and a
> lot of everyone else's for many years, but the way he was able to give
> that up in the end, after a crucial turning point, was nice, something
> encouraging.

The question is not from Baudrillard, the question is from the events.
Because Baudrillard did not want to engage a social thought, cause the
radical evil, the entropy, and the reversibility;-) after having made
himself party of the first maoist move in FR (having found the first
alliance of friends of the chinese cultural revolution with Guattari in 1962
"Association populaire franco-chinoise" of which paper he was the
redactor:)))  - you did not know that?;-) We say that he was the first
established intellectual when he left his brilliant studies in the end of
the fifties to

No do not imagine that he would return socially active in the meaning you
hope. But active he never stopped. There is not one text from Jean which
object is not a struggle to win, really...  From power to power it is always
a power to destroy which is in fact destroyed by the text (same way the
woman to seduce having caused an idilicateness to a transplant man)
> 
> all the best, Brian
> 
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>