Navel-gazing...

[conversant]

... that's the term Jean Baudrillard is searching for in the following excerpt. Navel-gazing.

from A M E R I C A, by Jean Baudrillard (1986)
[Translated in 1988 by Chris Turner from the original in French, Amerique. Excerpt posted here.]

... This is echoed by the other obsession: that of being 'into', hooked in to your own brain. What people are

Comments

[black_dog]

I don't know Baudrillard at all, and should probably correct that situation. But, since it is a quiet Sunday night, some reactions to this excerpt

Multipart Reply. (Oops.)

[conversant]

But Baudrillard seems to have in mind a much more sweeping critique of intellectual work -- he seems to be expressing a bilious and disgruntled contempt for, say, conventional humanism in general. And his point seems unearned, he seems to be making it by a kind of rhetorical sleight-of-hand.

Exactly. And I'm really glad it seems that way to you, as well.

I'm glad you found the energy, optimism and good sense to mount a defense of what some (many? all? most?) are doing when they (we, I hope) blog. I think I was just feeling sort of weary and depressed ... and susceptible to what I do think is an appallingly over-general critique. (I'll try to come back around to why it is so tempting to quote Baudrillard when feeling weary, disaffected, and/or slightly jaundiced about the world on- and off-line

Part Two of the Reply. (Of 3, apparently)

[conversant]

Consider this summary from one of the laudatory pages about his career:

Baudrillard argues in his book In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1983) that contemporary society has entered into a phase of implosion. He says that the old structures of class have vanished into what he describes as the void of the masses: "That spongy referent, that opaque but equally translucent reality, that nothingness: the masses." The masses no longer make themselves evident as a class (a category which has lost its force because of a proliferation of possible identities), they have been swamped by so much meaning that they have lost all meaning. They have been so continuously analyzed through statistics, opinion polls and marketing that they do not respond to enlightened political representation. They have absorbed and neutralized ideology, religion and the transcendental aspirations that accompany them. The masses have also absorbed all the old, modern categories which were once a potentially liberating force. According to Baudrillard the "Law that

Part Three. (Oi!)

[conversant]

To circle back to the passage I first quoted (about word-processing and self-pleasuring academic writing), I'll have to concede that the reason I found it quotable is precisely because its critique is so soft and so generalised. Whatever malaise I was feeling about LJ-writing or about academe or about the general level of intellectual conversation in America (ouch!) resonated easily with his contemptuous views of American education and culture. The point is, and I was only really seeing this at first with regard to academe -- the field for which I might be supposed to be over-sensitive and prone to special pleading -- his argument really is specious because his points are entirely unsupported. He may or may not be broadly correct, but he doesn't do anything to prove that he is correct in his analysis. (Instead, he says "Pish" to analysis as a tatty, old humanist style

[shezan]

Baudrillard is a posre and a bloody fraud, and I speak as 1. a Frenchwoman; 2. someone who's at least tried to read most of his books; 3. someone who spent half a week-end in Trouville in a house party of unsufferable Left Bank types that included him. Ukkk.

[conversant]

3. someone who spent half a week-end in Trouville in a house party of unsufferable Left Bank types that included him. Ukkk.

Thank you for this! You made my morning! (Sorry you had to be the one to obtain living proof that B is a miserable excuse for a human being.)

[shezan]

"poseur"

[conversant]

:)

[shusu]

In from fandomdirectory.

I can't speak to the quote itself, but I am wondering if and how it can be applied to the world in *1986*. The cyberpunk genre was in advanced stages at the time; the blogging community, on the other hand, did not exist because browsers did not exist.

I might comment on this using the model of a child sitting at an Apple IIe, except I was sort of five and don't remember it well. Eeep. ^^

[conversant]

You are quite right to point out the historical moment of B's commentary, and I like the idea that he was picturing a child sitting at an Apple IIe (on which I am old enough to have worked myself). It is quite true that when he wrote this, he was not writing about blogging or any other aspect of internet use. That said, it is possible to begin with his point and imagine that it has only become more true: there is something to his accusation that technology produces conditions that isolate human beings (true for those who decide to stay home and read their flists instead of going out into the world beyond their homes/offices/desktops). There is even a certain amount of fire beneath the smoke of his accusation that academic writers (society's supposed great thinkers) engage more with themselves than with anything of any use to anyone else. However -- as the conversation this post has generated illustrates -- Baudrillard's critique is also unfair and in-sufficiently founded. It appeals to our pessimistic and self-critical instincts (the