<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><DIV style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Charles, </SPAN></FONT><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">William, Jeffrey, Keith, and all,<SPAN style=""> </SPAN></SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">(Apologies for the length of this. I'm on vacation....)</SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV><P class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">The LA Times obituary for Baudrillard included this quotation:</SPAN></FONT></SPAN><SPAN style=""><O:P style=""></O:P></SPAN></P><P class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> </SPAN></FONT><O:P style=""></O:P></SPAN></P><P class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">“All of our values are simulated,” he told The New York Times in 2005. “What is freedom? We have a choice between buying one car or buying another car? It’s a simulation of freedom.”</SPAN></FONT></SPAN><SPAN style=""><O:P style=""></O:P></SPAN></P><P class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> </SPAN></FONT><O:P style=""></O:P></SPAN></P><P class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">There is something particularly ironic in the simulated recirculation of this Baudrillard quote between the two major consumer news brands of the "Times," spatially "unifying" the country under this thought as though it were his dying words, while being completely incapable of acting on them. Is this example perhaps a demonstration of the "truth" of his views?</SPAN></FONT></SPAN><SPAN style=""><O:P style=""></O:P></SPAN></P><P class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> </SPAN></FONT><O:P style=""></O:P></SPAN></P><P class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Keith and Grimshaw stressed that aspect of Baudrillard's work which stemmed from the isolation of his Cartesian subjectivity, his witnessing of American culture from the distancing interiority of the automobile as it moved through America's deserts. We should compare this to Roland Barthes' _Empire of Signs_ written about "Japan" from the viewpoint of Tokyo's airport, Warhol's favorite interior design we should note. Warhol, Barthes and Baudrillard have a great deal in common, acceptance of the 'real' as 'spectacle' in Debord's sense, and a political belief in the limits of interpretation, and existence, determined by this spectacle. Warhol excepted his status as human simulacrum, as did Baudrillard. Keith and Grimshaw attribute this to his elitism and the irrelevance of his writings to the 'actual' social conditions of 'America.' They prefer James' long term mixing with 'real America and real Americans.' What goes uncritically forward in this discourse is the 'outsider' romanticism of some critics from abroad - including Keith and Grimshaw themselves. And, at least in terms of the excerpt Keith posted, there is too little attention to the shifting constructions of US social, public identities, to make adequate comparisons between the three 'Americanist' scholars. Their criticism of Baudrillard is reduced to an assumption that his arrogance was defined by his supposed dismissal of the American "people" as stupid, an elitist misconception that James was not trapped by. I agree with William that this is not true of Baudrillard.</SPAN></FONT></SPAN></P><P class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> </SPAN></FONT><O:P style=""></O:P></SPAN></P><P class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">On the other hand, a</SPAN></FONT><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">s a born and bred, <SPAN style="">working class</SPAN> US-American, I can confirm that the national popular imaginary is indeed deeply problematic, quite often stupid, and stands in need of strenuous critique, at every class level, including, the largely, and increasing homogenized bourgeois academy. [I'm not bashing academia as a whole here, only its neoliberalization as market.] The "people," whoever they are, are not entitled to some criticism-free status. Ideologies and the political unconscious run deep. We are all very aware of the complexity of sociopolitical imaginary at every level - the ability of intelligence and astuteness to easily cohabit with their opposite. It may even be the case that the sociopolitical imaginary in the US is the epitome of such non-identical, psychic, split personality. How else explain, to cite but one obvious case, the continuation of lesser-of-evil voting on a mass scale by those who know better? who might best understand that voting lesser of the evil is still complicity enabling evil? What is this, but the crude cynicism Baudrillard describes, fully formed in the inability to organize on a "popular' level in numbers large enough to move in the exact opposite direction of MoveOn.org? toward the creation of a radically other political movement in the US? I'd assert that the lesser of evil voter mentality is more responsible for the political debacle in the US than the highly skilled maneuvering of the right, because there is virtually no resistance to it from a viable left. This problem coalesced around the polarizing impact of the Nader/Camejo campaign in 2004. Nader's quip summed it up when challenged by the deeply anti-democratic opposition of the ABB strategy: "What part of "I'm running," don't you understand?" Only the Latino-driven labor movement seems to understand this and is capable of moving against the (in)grain(ed). Baudrillard position is "useful," to address Charles' comments, precisely because it exposes the fantasy construction of a belief in "reform" politics. The neocon's understood this very well, and went for broke, and have succeeded in nothing less than revolutionary terms - they have succeeded in subverting the constitution and the separation of powers. Michael Moore's melodramatic getting down on his knees on national TV to beg Nader to withdraw from the race, is the epitome of such nihilistic reform fantasies. </SPAN></FONT></SPAN></P><P class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> </SPAN></FONT><O:P style=""></O:P></SPAN></P><P class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">Against the assumption of a politically astute 'national popular' in Gramsci's terms, and against the view that Baudrillard was an isolated Cartesian cogito, I'd claim that his position was ironic, as was Warhol's, and self-ironic in particular. This self-irony is immanently generous and social, self-inclusive, as demonstrated by their self-descriptions as spectacle automata. Cindy Sherman's work exemplifies this in her decades of photographic investigations of spectacle constructions of subjectivity. What is at fault, and is itself a form of nationalist arrogance and self-ignorance, is the assumption by "Americans" of some essentialized condition of 'Americanization,' free in particular of being a condition and product of spectacle forces. Only a subject-position performed through irony is capable of articulating the schizophrenic national popular in the US - once one stands outside of the libertarian individualist fantasies of non-ironic, non-complicit, political constructions. </SPAN></FONT></SPAN><SPAN style=""><O:P style=""></O:P></SPAN></P><P class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> </SPAN></FONT><O:P style=""></O:P></SPAN></P><P class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">I'm not sure where Jeffrey stand's in the end. "That indeed, spectacle trains "all of us" to "embrace nothing right?" I can't imagine that is what he means. While I agree that Baudrillard was on some level, "right" about some aspects of national popular imaginary, I don't agree that there are no lessons for transformation to be found in his work. I'm thinking of his recognition of the significance of the "warning" found on "rear view" mirrors on US cars: "Objects are closer than they seem." That is a startling, critically productive detournement when properly subjectivized. And it does, doesn't it, allude to Benjamin's angel of history, condemned to move into the future while only facing the past? I also agree that there is at times a moralistic strain in his writings, similar to, but not as bad as those to be found in Virilio. And while Jeffrey's examples are indeed exemplary of "social"l movements that have been concurrent with Baudrillard's "cynical irony," the fact is that many of these movements were self-destructively naive and self-deceptive with regard to the real-politics of mass-movement sociopolitical change. I do not mean in anyway to discredit the political sincerity of such movements, and recognize the lasting positive impacts they did, despite themselves, have; I only mean, in Baudrillardian fashion, to unmask the limitations that led so rapidly to their failure. Adorno's condemnation of Marcuse's condoning of the 60's social </SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">movements was prescient, and in retrospect, correct. So now what? </SPAN></FONT></SPAN><SPAN style=""><O:P style=""></O:P></SPAN></P><P class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none; text-autospace:none"><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> </SPAN></FONT><O:P style=""></O:P></SPAN></P><DIV class="MsoNormal"><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">I've been thinking of late that political critique has fetishized two terms of political discourse - effectiveness and relevance - while completely neglecting a third, more important one - that of complicity. It is here that Baudrillard still has transformative significance. I no longer think that social change can be brought about in the US national popular imaginary, as a form of mass political consciousness, through rational argument - through thought - because the spectacle has so deeply colonized the political imagination and dumbed it down to the level of mere fantasy.</SPAN></FONT><SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"> </SPAN></FONT></SPAN><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">I no longer think that you can change, at any social level, in the US, very many people's minds by attempting to change what they think, but, only, first, through changing what they feel. What is needed is an Affective Politics. And I think Baudrillard can be read anew along the axis of affectivity, through the mode of irony, one that flips the hierarchy of thought-feeling to become, feeling-thought. The converse of the subjective law: objects are closer than they seem; is: subjects are more distant than they seem; in other words, it is a very sharply focused statement of alienation. It is through examination of the patterns of complicity that the affective can make the political relevant and effective, and, without submitting to utopian or distopian fantasies, begin turning the angel of history toward imagining alternative futures. For it is in our peripheral visions, to allude to Lacan, that our complicities will have been found, should we survive the coming deluge.</SPAN></FONT><O:P style=""></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;">mark bartlett</SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px;"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></SPAN></FONT></DIV></DIV><BR><DIV><DIV>On Mar 13, 2007, at 1:20 PM, Merrin W. wrote:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV><FONT face="Arial" color="#000000" size="2"><DIV style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0cm; "><FONT face="Times New Roman" size="3">I’m still stunned by some of this discussion. I honestly thought that with the general availability of Baudrillard’s work in translation these days that a better understanding of his work might exist. Again and again the same comments keep appearing –Baudrillard offered no hope, he had no programme for change, he saw no possibility of change, he ignored power/politics/the poor etc. so what do you expect? All we can do is smile at him and shrug …</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0cm; "><O:P><FONT face="Times New Roman" size="3"> </FONT></O:P></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0cm; "><FONT face="Times New Roman" size="3">In fact Baudrillard’s career is best understood as an attempt to develop both an escalating analysis of the operation of the western semiotic system and the forms of social control that produce and govern us today and a similarly escalating analysis of those symbolic forms that he argues shadow the system, irrupt within it or through it or arise from external sources – his names for these changed but included the symbolic, symbolic exchange, seduction, reversal, the fatal, evil, the singularity etc. Baudrillard never gives up hope (in fact that might be a better critique of his work – his tendency always to find that glimmer…), and he pursued his hope of something fighting the semiotic in the form of his work (in his own theoretical methodology – in his writing and its different strategies), in the content of his work (in his analysis of forms such as the masses, processes such as terrorism, and events such as the Gulf War or western globalisation etc.) as well as in practices he favoured (such as photography). He wasn’t a Marxist and his rejection of the ‘gold standard’, referential real of the proletariat and their revolution means that a lot of critics didn’t see what he was doing but he looked for and continually found modes and processes of reversal. A lot of the reason why many people miss this in him is because they don’t realise it’s there because they’re too busy focusing upon the first part of his analysis – of simulation. Too few people have paid attention to the symbolic, its meaning in his work, its critical function and its practical efficacy. Just focusing on simulation means you mistake him for an apolitical, nihilistic celebrant. Marx described capitalism but it didn't make him a capitalist. Baudrillard may describe simulation ...</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0cm; "><O:P><FONT face="Times New Roman" size="3"> </FONT></O:P></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0cm; "><FONT size="3"><FONT face="Times New Roman">I also saw the earlier post which involved a critique of Baudrillard’s book '<ST1:COUNTRY-REGION><ST1:PLACE>America'</ST1:PLACE></ST1:COUNTRY-REGION>. It’s not that important a book in his oeuvre but I do wonder if we’ve been reading the same book. All that stuff about <SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>‘Baudrillard in reality gives vent to the deep hostility he feels towards the common people. They simply do not exist in his book’ etc. is hornswoggle. The entire critique advanced in the post is a typical product of its time – a petty and prett smug assault on what Baudrillard represents to the writer and their own feelings about his claimed postmodernism and European and intellectual status etc. rather than what he wrote in that book.The book itself bears little relation to what's being said about it. Just go to the chapter ‘The End of US Power?’ and you’ll find a major discussion (see especially p. 112-13 of the verso translation) of the disenfranchisement of the poor with the turn to new right political and economic policies in the early 1980s. His critique of this systematic withdrawal of interest from entire sections of society is superb (‘entire swathes of the population are falling into oblivion, being totally abandoned…’) and his description of the process as an ‘ex-communication’ is spot on – reworking a religious concept in the light of what it means in a communications-based society to develop a powerful Durkheimian critique of the desocialisation of the poor and the withdrawal of even that simulation of participation he saw consumerism as offering when he wrote about it in ‘The Mirror of Production’. Baudrillard didn’t see the common people…? Nah, people don’t see Baudrillard. </FONT></FONT></DIV><P class="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><FONT size="3"><FONT face="Times New Roman"></FONT></FONT> </P><DIV style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0cm; "><FONT size="3"><FONT face="Times New Roman">On the day of his funeral, I'll defend him against all-comers.</FONT></FONT></DIV><P class="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><FONT size="3"><FONT face="Times New Roman"></FONT></FONT> </P><DIV style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0cm; "><FONT size="3"><FONT face="Times New Roman">William Merrin</FONT></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0cm; "><FONT face="Times New Roman" size="3">Dept of Media and Communication Stuides</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0cm; "><FONT face="Times New Roman" size="3">University of Wales, Swansea</FONT></DIV></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">_______________________________________________</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (distributedcreativity.org)</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><A href="mailto:iDC@mailman.thing.net">iDC@mailman.thing.net</A></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><A href="http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc">http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc</A></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">List Archive:</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><A href="http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/">http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/</A></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">iDC Photo Stream:</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><A href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/</A></DIV> </BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR></BODY></HTML>