Jean Baudrillard Did Not Die

[bruno]

baudrillard was very pro reality and anti-bulshit, tea, i think you would like him. read on seduction!

yes, the title is a bit enfuriating considering people were raped, tortured, killed, exposed to chemicals and the desert laid to waste. it was clearly a war, albeit a heavily mediated and sanitised one from the point of view of the west, hence the title. but that's baudrillard's style. i think it's important to remember he is a product of french disenchantment with reality in the 60s and 70s, not a part of but definitely in the context of the contestation réac and the exposure of the farce that was real socialism. leftists became less obnoxious, less anti-american, a lot of cioran was read, more fun was had and more excess embraced (but never fascism the way scum like christopher hitchens do today, though i see glucksmann has gone to the dogs!).

 

[nomadologist]

Another problem with the music apocalypse idea: I think the real problem is not that there's no "Next Big Thing", it's that people want music to be entertainment, they want to sit back and wait for someone to furnish the world with the "Next Big Thing" just so there is one, some sort of consensus view of what's "great" to replace the old canons. Not enough people want to make music that is the "Next Big Thing", and even fewer people want to make music at all if it can't be the "Next Big Thing."

Now, instead of having kids in their rooms playing three chords on an out-of-tune guitar dreaming of one day sublimating all of the libido their sad suburban existence suffocates, they all sit around complaining that they're not entertained. It's as much a "demand-side" issue as it is a supply-side one...

 

[nomadologist]

So there can be vibrant, energised desiring machines on an individual level, but scleroticised, exhausted, cultures on the collective level? Isn't this why desire is irrelevant? This sounds like a one-line summary of everything that's wrong with Deleuzianism.

didn't see this till just now--the culture's been dead, as Baudrillard's pointed out, as Lyotard pointed out, as most 20th century theorists tended to believe, and it will continue to be if people refuse to MAKE music and sit around crying about how there is no good music.

i like Baudrillard, but his limitations in terms of ontology and complete lack of response to Heidegger in any vaguely elegant way (I don't really have as much respect for thinkers who don't take up H. to at least some extent) outnumber D&G's by a long shot. I have also never heard of "Deleuzianism"--I hope no one swallows any thinker hook line and sinker to the point where they are *practicing*. Then you're not thinking yourself, are you? Sounds like when people say "deconstructionism" instead of "deconstruction" to try to insult Derrida.

 

[nomadologist]

Since when were innovations in music ever fast? Most quantum leaps in formal musical evolution came at the heels of technological innovations. When we developed the tonal system in the West, and then we could temper the keyboard, we had string instruments, we had a four-five hundred year period of what's now called "classical" music where the formal innovations came every two or three generations.

the problem is that people don't understand how to appreciate something aesthetically anymore--they have no patience, they can't take anything seriously, and they care too much about what they should like and how music needs some sort of consensus viewed acceptance to be really good. not that music needs to innovate formally every three weeks. the problem is that even the people who should know better, the ones who know all the good music, who should be preserving that for the next generation/s instead declare everything dead and over aesthetically because nothing hits them like it did when they were an adolescent (how could it? how could anything ever match that sort of frustrated energy?)

 

[old goriot]

In the first case, something happened, but was it really a 'match'?

And if someone actually loses on purpose, we are surely not witnessing a match at all - what we are seeing is a simulation, precisely.

In the first case, yes it definitly was a match - it doesn't matter if the odds are 1000 to 1. (which are probably the odds that Saddam faced)

In the second, well, I probably shouldn't have added the losing on purpose part, because it is disanalogous to the whole point I was making about Saddam (that he did not set out to lose). IF he had have, I could see the plausibility of Baudrillard's statement that the war did not happen in a certain sense.

 

[swears]

didn't see this till just now--the culture's been dead, as Baudrillard's pointed out, as Lyotard pointed out, as most 20th century theorists tended to believe, and it will continue to be if people refuse to MAKE music and sit around crying about how there is no good music.

But with the advent of the powerful home PC, DAW interfaces and the net, there are more people making music than ever now, and far easier means of distributing it, it seems every other young person I meet is dabbling.
But so much of it seems bound by rules and genre conventions, as if everybody's a late adopter of one style or another.

 

[old goriot]

Yes, but it is important not to fall into the trap of the Socialist Realist bookburners and imply that Baudrillard was denying that actual people died. The point is that actual people died as part of a video-game.

I think one can take valid issue with Baudrillard without accusing him of denying the actual events. More often than not, I think this argument has been used as a means of mis-characterizing the objections of Baudrillard's detractors (as if all these academics are blockheads that can't fathom a metaphor). I think the argument is that the Gulf War and AIDS are highly dubious metaphors/examples for the theories Baudrillard advances - which is not to say the theories are without merit. The problem is that he never seemed to bother undertaking even the most rudimentary research into highly sensitive topics before haphazardly applying his theories to them. I know tenured Lacanians who are about as far from social realists as you can get who found his writing on AIDS to be very questionable. To add to the difficulty of discussing the topic, Baudrillard's writing is unorthodox (and according to some purposefully obscure) and his defenders rarely agree on what it is they are defending. Both you and Nomadologist disagree with me here, but it seems that you are defending two separate positions.

In my opinion giving literal weight to the statement "Th Gulf War did not Happen" profoundly weakens any position defending Baudrillard. What is the purpose of a literal reading of this phrase? It seems that the only aim served by upholding the literal aspect of this phrase is sensationalism. It is akin to entitling a book "All Muslims are Murderers" to grab people's attention, and then go "Well, I didn't really mean all Muslims are literally murderers (although I purposefully phrased it in a way that was sure to result in a literal reading) what I really mean can be discovered if you purchase and read my book"

 

[nomadologist]

Swears: there may be more people amateurishly playing around at home, but it's actually NOT easier to distribute your music widely than it ever was. The industry has more of a hegemonic stranglehold on what gets produced for widescale distribution than ever.

I think the problem is everyone's stuck in the marketplace. If you're going to talk about "desire" being dead--well, don't project. Mine's not. Some people still have desire, and believe it or not, some people can direct it so that it's not completely tied up in the fucking music industry's marketplace and its lame whims.

Open-sourcing and peer-to-peer file sharing threatened the music industry's preeminence, the music industry fought back making some classic mistakes, music is temporarily in a sort of stagnant place while these market trends correct themselves (as all market trends do) and eventually, there'll be a new genre of music, or a few new artists that seem interesting again.

I mean, I find it kind of hilarious to call hip-hop "sclerotic" and when you're seriously looking to thrice-warmed over "metal" genre for the last remnant of what's interesting in music. Especially when the "metal" sounds as much like shoegaze indie rock as it does hard rock.

 

[nomadologist]

In my opinion giving literal weight to the statement "Th Gulf War did not Happen" profoundly weakens any position defending Baudrillard.

You can't have it both ways: either the Real is lost or it isn't. Not surprising, then, that most people have no time for Baudrillard. I respect what he's doing but I don't know that I think he has the "final say" on virtuality--lots of people since have made great cases for virtuality and the loss of the Real that don't require us to believe that the Gulf War never happened.

 

[STN]

I've only read two of his books so don't really feel qualified to comment but I think it is worth remembering that 'The Iraq War Did Not Take Place' is a reference to the title of a play, isn't it? So I don't think it's simply disingenuous attention grabbing so much as making a point in itself.

 

[swears]

O/T alert!

Swears: there may be more people amateurishly playing around at home, but it's actually NOT easier to distribute your music widely than it ever was.

I dunno, I've heard a lot of very slick, commercial sounding home-productions, it's not like ten or twenty years ago when most home musicians had to knock out hissy four-track tapes. I think the web has made it a lot easier for musicians to reach a niche audience, but you are right about it being just as hard to "crossover" or "break through".
And yeah, I don't get a lot of the fuss surrounding the recent interest in metal, most of the innovations such as the use of drone or extreme complexity have already been well trodden outside of the genre.

 

[Mr. Tea]

baudrillard was very pro reality and anti-bulshit, tea, i think you would like him. read on seduction!

Fair enough - as I said earlier, it was what it said about his ideas on the BBC News website that got my goat and seemed to sum up everything I find spurious and vapid about postmodernism, although everyone on here familiar with him assures me it's not really what he thought at all.

 

[nomadologist]

Something can sound slick in a very amateurish way. This is where actual training and expertise matter. For example: what sounds slick to you would not sound slick to my audio production instructor, who worked for Sony as a senior engineer for like 20 years. Trust me, it wouldn't.

Drone is fun enough, I like it, I like hypnotic music: but there's still no lifestyle there. I can't muster any interest in these musicians themselves. It's boring in the same way all rock is boring: there are no iconographically huge personalities there. I don't care about your precious basment jam sessions unless you can make me interested, you know? The "black metal" or "drone metal" or whatever they're called people are not really selling me anything I couldn't do myself with my boyfriend's guitars and bass and an 8-track recorder. Maybe our 909.

 

[nomadologist]

spurious and vapid about postmodernism

how can you find something you've never read and seem to know next to nothing about "spurious and vapid"? please stop talking about "post-modernism" until you read enough to even have a clue what that means. for the love of the god and all that is good in the world. please. stop. ... .. .

 

[Mr. Tea]

I know enough about it, or at least some of the more extreme strains of it, to have an opinion on it. I don't have to listen to every hard house compilation ever to be able to say I don't like it.

http://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/dawkins.html

 

[swears]

I know enough about it, or at least some of the more extreme strains of it, to have an opinion on it. I don't have to listen to every hard house compilation ever to be able to say I don't like it.

http://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/dawkins.html

Hmmm...this sort of theory bashing is like saying "All this German sounds like gibberish to me." If you don't understand something, how can you critisize it?

 

[Mr. Tea]

I'm just saying that I've heard enough examples of the kind of things postmodern thinkers sometimes come out with to justify being antagonistic towards it. Like the academic who declared that the dynamics of rigid bodies was essentially a solved science because the subject matter was inherently 'masculine' (because stiff rods are a bit like cocks, you see?) whereas fluid dynamics still contained open questions because it was inherently 'feminine', and thus abhorred by the patriarchal physics community. The link I posted contains several examples of egregious abuses of scientific and mathematical concepts to try and justify nebulous claims about something-or-other.

 

[old goriot]

I'm just saying that I've heard enough examples of the kind of things postmodern thinkers sometimes come out with to justify being antagonistic towards it. Like the academic who declared that the dynamics of rigid bodies was essentially a solved science because the subject matter was inherently 'masculine' (because stiff rods are a bit like cocks, you see?) whereas fluid dynamics still contained open questions because it was inherently 'feminine', and thus abhorred by the patriarchal physics community. The link I posted contains several examples of egregious abuses of scientific and mathematical concepts to try and justify nebulous claims about something-or-other.

He has a point. The academic rigour of many recent intellectual superstars in the continental vein is hardly beyond reproach. It seems that all too often they are given a pass because they are on the good side, while someone like Allan Bloom would get absolutely ripped apart if he published similar statements.

 

[k-punk]

I think one can take valid issue with Baudrillard without accusing him of denying the actual events. More often than not, I think this argument has been used as a means of mis-characterizing the objections of Baudrillard's detractors (as if all these academics are blockheads that can't fathom a metaphor). "

To say that the claim mustn't be taken literally doesn't entail that it be taken metaphorically.

If anything the Gulf War is a metonym - i.e. it isn't an image of what he is talking about, it is part of what he is talking about.

And I'm afraid that many of those academics were too witless to fathom his arguments; when , for instance, they were out on the streets in Manchester in the early 90s denouncing Baudrillard, it was because they claimed he was denying the reality of the suffering. This isn't to say that everyone who objects to Baudrillard is that stupid, naturally.

Bear in mind also that Baudrillard was making these claims BEFORE the Gulf War happened - the perception that this would be a media non-event was not then widespread. Many thought that it would be a war in a long, drawn-out conflict in the style of Vietnam.

 

[IdleRich]

Hmmm...this sort of theory bashing is like saying "All this German sounds like gibberish to me." If you don't understand something, how can you critisize it?

I think the general point here is, if someone writes something that is demonstrably bollocks about a subject you know a little about then why would you look to them to teach you about something of which you know nothing?
I would be interested to know what response Baudrillard's supporters would make to this bit from the link

The renowned Jean Baudrillard is only one of many to find chaos theory a useful tool for bamboozling readers. Once again, Sokal and Bricmont help us by analysing the tricks being played. The following sentence, "though constructed from scientific terminology, is meaningless from a scientific point of view":

"Perhaps history itself has to be regarded as a chaotic formation, in which acceleration puts an end to linearity and the turbulence created by acceleration deflects history definitively from its end, just as such turbulence distances effects from their causes."

Is he being mis-represented? Maybe it doesn't matter if it's "meaningless from a scientific point of view", maybe something was lost in translation or maybe he is simply wrong because he was outside his field and that doesn't detract from his other work. What do K-Punk and Nomadologist think?