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

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

On 3/11/07, Aliette <aliette@criticalsecret.org> wrote:

> Militant means a hierarchy that I cannot imagine to return with. Being
> exactly the social representation of structured action to tribute the
> reproduction of the same, from and to every time of political action even
> democratic centralism.

I'm not interested in returning to Leninist models, either. But there
are lots of other ways of creating *relation*, of putting people
together outside of administration or exchange. For me this was the
significance of the 'nettime years', back when it was more than a
listserver. It was about very loose relations with very weak force,
but lots of them.

If you read Adilkno's book Media Archive, which is still strongly
influenced by Baudrillard, then you look at all the experiments in new
media from that time as not being about the technology but being about
relation, then you find there a quite different species of Baudrillard
epigone to the more cliched kind Brian mentions.

I think those folks would have been boring no matter who they took up,
whereas JB did help some really interesting people think their way out
of some tired assumptions about media. The new media politics / theory
/ art practices partly took off from him, but not by imitation.

But another consequence of that period was the idea that we didn't
have to agree on the theory first before there could be 'practice'.
Theory could be used pragmatically and in the plural. There was a
price to pay for that in rigor, in thinking things through, but if you
had ever been in those interminable arguments about the 'line' it was
refreshing, to say the least.

One question that hasn't come up yet, though, is pedagogy: how to
teach theory as a practice, in the schools as well as outside of it.
None of this will have happened unless somebody teaches it...

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