From: Damien Broderick (thespike@earthlink.net)
Date: Tue Dec 10 2002 - 17:05:34 MST
Robert J. Bradbury laments:
> On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, Hubert Mania wrote:
>
> > Reading Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, Virilio...
> I've never even heard of any of these people.
In the case of Jean Baudrillard (pron: Boh-dree-are, and once incredibly
fashionable in chic salons), you're not missing much. Nor indeed with most
of these buggers. Here's a little aria from my book THEORY & ITS
DISCONTENTS, and apologies for any who've been this way before:
============
Walter Kaufmann neatly summarised Heidegger's lexical approach to the ground
(Grund) of Being: `He speaks of ergrunden (fathom) and Grundung (foundation)
and distinguishes between Ur-grund (primal ground), Ab-grund (abyss) and
Un-grund (bottomlessness?)... The piling up of words with the same root -
one of the most characteristic devices of Heidegger's style - induces a
spurious sense of illumination, an unfounded conviction that something has
been explained' (Kaufmann, 1960, pp. 345-6). Unsympathetic critics go
further. George Steiner (who is more generous, for reasons that fail to
persuade me) characterises their response to Heidegger's eccentric method:
"[Even] a polemical discussion of Heidegger's method is merely futile. His
writings are a thicket of impenetrable verbiage; the questions he poses are
sham questions.... To try to analyse Heideggerian `ontology'... is to speak,
or to speak of, nonsense - non-sense, in the most drastic connotations of
the term.... [His influence] is nothing less than disastrous, both
philosophically and politically.... This is not, I repeat, a finding that
can be peremptorily dismissed or reduced to mere professional myopia. It is
a critique and counterstatement which should be kept steadily in view,
however problematic it makes the obvious dimension, the intense presence of
Heidegger's example and writings in current reference and sensibility."
(Steiner, 1992, pp. 4, 59)
Contemporary theory, in many respects both a child of and a reaction
against Heidegger, carries over much of his method of linguistic
peregrination. To cite Steiner once more: `His punning - where "punning" is
too feeble a designation for an uncanny receptivity to the fields of
resonance, of consonance, of suppressed echo in phonetic and semantic
units - has bred, to the point of parody, the post-structuralism and
deconstructionism of today' (p. xiii). Let us muse for a moment on a long
paragraph of Jean Baudrillard. His essay America (1988) is described on the
blurb as the `most accessible and evocative book' by `France's leading
philosopher of postmodernism'. The textual surface, as usual, flares
appropriately like sun-blasted mica as he drives fast down the freeways of
southern American deserts `where humours and fluids become rarefied, where
the air is so pure that the influence of the stars descends direct from the
constellations' (p. 6). What follows is post-Heideggerian poetry, of a kind,
but what is it saying, if anything? If, indeed, anything definite or
assayable [...] can be found in its delirium:
"Speed creates pure objects. It is itself a pure object, since it
multiplies surfaces and territorial reference-points, since it paralyses
time to annul space itself, since it moves more quickly that its own effect
and obliterates that effect by outstripping it. Speed is the triumph of
cause over effect, the triumph of duration over time as instantaneity, the
triumph of desire over the superficiality of the boundary and of pure
subjectality. Speed creates a time of closure which is never lethal; its
only rule is to leave some trace behind. Triumph of memory over forgetting,
an enriched, mnemonic intoxication. The profundity and irreversibility of an
attenuated object in the complex geometry of the desert. Driving like this
produces a kind of hypervisibility, opacity, or longitudinality in
signifiers, simply by permeating them. It is a sort of accelerated rebirth,
renewal by a compression of forms - the delectable form of their appearance
out of nowhere. Speed is the explosion of DNA. It is far from the mineral,
no reflected image, and it already evades catastrophe, any squandering of
time. Perhaps, though, its fascination is simply that of the plenum. There
is absolute seduction here, for seduction requires disclosure. Speed is
simply the rite that initiates us into saturation: an anticipatory desire
for forms to explode into motion, concealed beyond the very rarefaction of
their immobility. Akin to the nostalgia for geometry that haunts living
forms." (pp. 6-7)
Now it is true that one intuits some remote glimmering of what Baudrillard
means in this deluge of words, a hazy grasp that the notion of `speed' has
become an agile signifier in his phenomenological circus. His enthusiastic
supporters, and there are many, would reject with anger and contempt any
request for clarity, for reductive intelligibility. What we have just read,
they declare, is `thinking the postmodern' in the mode of hyperreality, and
cannot be paraphrased or rendered into syllogisms with unambiguous
signifieds. To ask for lucidity is stupidly vulgar, not to say
embarrassingly uncool.
One might wonder, though, if this plea is altogether convincing. Are we not
being called upon to take rather a lot on trust? Is this not just another
version of what Steiner dubbed, in the persona of a sceptic, Heidegger's
`mystical bullying' (Steiner, 1992, p. 12)? Suppose we try a simple
experiment and reverse the apparent polarity of some of these hectic
sentences. Would the new passage abruptly be less profound, less magically
poetic - even less self-evidently `true'? Certainly that would be the case
if we altered, say, `e equals m c squared' into `e equals m root c', or
`Sydney is the capital of Latvia' into its denial:
"Speed creates pure objects. It is itself a pure object, since it cancels
out the ground and territorial reference-points, since it runs ahead of time
to annul time itself, since it moves more quickly that its own cause and
obliterates that cause by outstripping it. Speed is the triumph of effect
over cause, the triumph of instantaneity over time as depth, the triumph of
the surface and pure objectality over the profundity of desire. Speed
creates a space of initiation, which may be lethal; its only rule is to
leave no trace behind. Triumph of forgetting over memory, an uncultivated,
amnesic intoxication. The superficiality and reversibility of a pure object
in the pure geometry of the desert. Driving like this produces a kind of
invisibility, transparency, or transversality in things, simply by emptying
them out. It is a sort of slow-motion suicide, death by an extenuation of
forms - the delectable form of their disappearance. Speed is not a vegetal
thing. It is nearer to the mineral, to refraction through a crystal, and it
is already the site of a catastrophe, of a squandering of time. Perhaps,
though, its fascination is simply that of the void. There is no seduction
here, for seduction requires a secret. Speed is simply the rite that
initiates us into emptiness: a nostalgic desire for forms to revert to
immobility, concealed beneath the very intensification of their mobility.
Akin to the nostalgia for living forms that haunts geometry."
Is this not, after all, as agreeable as the original? A devotee of
dialectical thought might be happy to concur that it must be, since all
propositions incorporate their negations. For the rest of us, I suspect my
demonstration deals Baudrillard's method a blow, perhaps a lethal one. For
if a proposition `A' strikes us as profound, beautiful and compelling, and a
moment later `not-A' has the same impact, it is worth checking to see if we
are perhaps intoxicated rather than persuaded.
Some readers will dispute this account, claiming that Baudrillard's rich
paradoxes and non-sequiturs are merely parodied and banalised in my second
version. It is precisely because that second version fails to create
conviction in us that the buzzy insight of Baudrillard's own words is
confirmed. Perhaps so. All I can do, as a situated commentator within a set
of discursive values defended in this book, is to express my doubt that
either version makes much sense (aside from the cliches that neither
paragraph manages to avoid). By the way, the second version is actually
Baudrillard's original. I hope you found my own contrary version no less
profound, mysterious and hypertrue. But perhaps I have just lied to you, and
the first version is, after all, the correct translation from Baudrillard's
French. Can you tell, by re-reading the fragments, which of my claims is
more likely to be true? If you cannot, where does this leave us? (And what
have I proved if this is the case?)
=========
Damien Broderick
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