Re: [-empyre-] A view from "Baudrillard and the Media"

[Aliette <aliette@criticalsecret.org>]

>From my part, dear Nich, I can't tell nothing on Debray and much less on
Henri-Levy. Not more of Deleuze having not read enough his philosophy to
speak on.

I hope that William Merrin will honour us to discuss with you, but I think
that he is not yet a subscriber of Empyre. Just a passage in Idc for answer
in a debate that for a part discredited Baudrillard. May be can you come,
William ?

What interested me in his view concerns more the question of a possible
scientific genealogy of Baudrillard's ideas from a part of the proper object
of Sociology. Because first he was a sociologist. The idea of the object as
corpus of his proper research leaving the question of the subject from
metaphysics and modern phenomenology, can having meet both the question of
the progressive disappearance of the political philosophy, and the history
of proper sociology describing its corpus as object, exactly at the French
sociologist Durkheim.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Durkheim

Durkheim having definite the question of the corpus of research through the
necessity of the object instead the affect: having to "consider the social
facts as things". What may be a well part of Baudrillard to have transfer
this relevance of sociology to post political philosophy as a defy of
struggle - even his concept of the social "silent mass".


On 14/03/07 18:34, "Nicholas Ruiz III" <editor@intertheory.org> probably
wrote:

> The reluctance to read work like that of Jean
> Baudrillard as 'serious' is one of the great mysteries
> of literary consumption.  It seems that for reasons
> which escape me, his work is the bullseye of a target
> that includes Deleuze and Guattari's books, and in
> general all that is or may be construed as
> 'postmodern'...
> 
> It is interesting that other engaging work, for
> example, like that of Regis Debray, seems better
> received, and yet, I would say is every bit as related
> to the 'postmodern,' in terms of its style or
> mise-en-scene, no?  Further, postmodern literature
> (fiction) is well-received and sells quite well on
> both sides of the Atlantic.  Regis is not well known
> in the U.S.-- Random House would rather we warm up to
> Bernard Henri-Levy; perhaps Aliette or William can
> better inform us, as to Debray's relative reception in
> France or Europe?
> 
> Who might deliver us with a reading of the academic
> angst that delivers such a militant aggression toward
> the work of particular theorists or genres of thought
> and writing...?
> 
> NRIII
> 
> --- Aliette <aliette@criticalsecret.org> wrote:
> 
>>> From William Merrin, author of:
>> 
>>     "Baudrillard and the Media: A Critical
>> Introduction"
>> 
>> @ Polity Press, UK (Nov 2005)
>> 
>> As abstract here an extract from the interactive
>> review of the book at
>> amazon.co.uk:
>> 
>> " Baudrillard is a much mis-represented figure in
>> cultural theory. He's
>> consistently misunderstood by otherwise intelligent
>> people who are either a)
>> annoyed by his Gallic provocations or b) have a
>> vested interest in wishing
>> to safeguard their much more conformist assessments
>> of contemporary life.
>> 
>> Merrin does a great job setting the record straight.
>> The book is
>> comprehensive and stimulating and points out the
>> various ways in which
>> Baudrillard's thought adds another dimension to the
>> frequently uncritical
>> and culturally populist field of Media Studies.
>> 
>> If you want to understand in a much more
>> sophisticated fashion than the
>> media could ever explain, such issues as the
>> inability of the West to
>> understand properly the sensitivities of the Islamic
>> world - this is the
>> book for you. "
>> 
>> ----------
>> (with his direct allow to repost it from Idc list to
>> Empyre)
>> 
>> 
>> Facing Ken and Nich I think that may be they can
>> have any interesting and
>> different view,
>> 
>> Aliette 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> /////////////////
>> First post: 
>> //////////////
>> 
>> I joined this list because a friend had passed onto
>> me the first two
>> emails regarding Jean Baudrillard. I have to say
>> that I'm disappointed
>> by the level of knowledge they display. I would
>> immediately fail
>> undergraduates who demonstrated such a lack of
>> knowledge of his work and
>> filled the space instead with such poorly
>> thought-through invective.
>> 
>> The first commentator said:
>> 
>> 'Thus beguiling, but ultimately fairly dubious,
>> totalising and
>> empirically unsupportable, or at least highly
>> reductive notions about
>> 'simulacra' and 'simulation' were not only taken far
>> too seriously, but
>> helped to produce and support cultural phenomena
>> which were then taken
>> as evidence of the rightness of Baudrillard's ideas'
>> 
>> The simulacrum is actually a historical concept,
>> found explicitly and
>> implicitly in the theological, anthropological and
>> philosophical
>> literature. The western tradition repeatedly founds
>> its primary
>> theologies and philosophies on the attempt to reduce
>> the efficacy of the
>> image (whether the man-made image, the world as
>> image of the divine, or
>> the images that constitute our interior knowledge)
>> and to demonise its
>> power to assert itself as the full reality. This
>> 'simulacrum', however,
>> has always challenged every truth system built upon
>> it, whether idealist
>> or materialist. To give an example, empiricism
>> serves as the basis for
>> science and social science yet its primary
>> philosophers were aware of
>> how the images of subjective thought and sensation
>> completely ungrounded
>> their attempt to turn subjectivity into objectivity.
>> Read Lucretius on
>> simulacra, or Bacon on the 'idols of the mind'
>> ('idol' = 'eidolon',
>> which is also translated as 'simulacra'), or Hume's
>> scepticism, which is
>> better understood as a sensitivity to the ancient
>> problem posed by the
>> simulacrum for the possibility of knowledge...
>> Empiricism, therefore,
>> may well 'work', but philosophically it's a
>> simulation machine for
>> producing our modern concept of 'objectivity' (and
>> don't get me started
>> on the ludicrousness of 'social science'...). So I'm
>> afraid you're
>> trying to shoot down an idea that's pretty well
>> accepted throughout
>> western history. Baudrillard, following Deleuze,
>> Derrida, Klossowski and
>> Perniola merely takes up and applies this
>> problematic to a contemporary
>> imagic world. If his idea of simulation should not
>> have been taken so
>> seriously we should also throw out Plato,
>> Tertullian, Descartes, Hume
>> etc. As for the simulacrum not being 'empirically
>> supportable', you've
>> got it the wrong way round. It's empiricism that
>> isn't empirically
>> supportable because of the simulacrum, not that
>> you're likely to care
>> about or follow these arguments because there's no
>> evidence here of
>> Baudrillard having been read let alone of any
>> attempt to understand the
>> concepts he uses and their cultural and historical
>> significance. And
>> then we just shoot the messenger ... Baudrillard is
>> responsible for the
>> simulacra we experience today? ... Sure, just like
>> Marx was responsible
>> for industrial capitalism I suppose? This entire
>> discussion of
>> Baudrillard overlooks the fact that he was a critic
>> of simulacra and
>> that he spent his entire career developing a radical
>> Durkheimian
>> critique based upon the concept of 'symbolic
>> exchange'. Ultimately the
>> only reductiveness here is the sub-standard reading
>> of Baudrillard.
>> That's because it takes time and thought to work
>> through the 50 odd
>> books he wrote and put them into any kind of
>> context. It's far easier to
>> watch UK Gold and talk about John Inman.
>> 
>> And then we get a follow up comment that's worse. I
>> thought this idea
>> that Baudrillard denied the physical existence of
>> the Gulf War had
>> disappeared over a decade ago when his original
>> essays appeared in
>> translation  ... but no. Here it is again.
>> 
>> To sum up this comment: Baudrillard apparently
>> steamrollers 'over
>> material reality, going so far as denying the
>> reality of the Gulf War',
>> whereas war 'has real consequences' and his ideas
>> 'deny the dignity of
>> war's victims'. Baudrillard has no critique of power
>> and is apolitical
>> and you can prove he's wrong because you can 'walk
>> down actual streets
>> filled with meaty reality'.
>> 
>> OK, Baudrillard doesn't deny material reality
>> exists. He repeatedly says
>> in fact it's the excess of reality not its loss that
>> is the problem
>> today. He is not an idealist and doesn't think 'all
>> is fiction' and that
>> we're all floating around in nothingness. This is a
>> moronic reading. He
>> is concerned with the way in which our experience of
>> that real is
>> organised, programmed and produced as part of a
>> concern with the
>> semiotic processes of social control operating
>> through our media and
>> through everyday life (following Debord, Marcuse
>> etc.) and he critiques
>> this process from the point of view of symbolic
>> exchange, an idea that
>> in its radical Durkheimian derivation serves as his
>> critical ground and
>> functions as precisely that material, experiential
>> and moral real that
>> you accuse him of not believing in...
>> 
>> As to the Gulf War, the simulation of war was not
>> primarily 
> === message truncated ===
> 
> 
> Dr. Nicholas Ruiz III
> Editor, Kritikos
> http://intertheory.org
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