[iDC] Re: iDC Digest, Vol 29, Issue 21

[A. G-C]

Sorry if I have so much difficulty to speak English (more to write it).

I'm sorry but there is no common point as corpus of research between Debord
and Baudrillard, whatever they have both worked on the commodity, but just
regarding themselves in mirror - or complementary.

Read such a thing gives the idea that you would not have read one of them..

If you knew properly the new Marxism coming from the sociologist Henri
Lefebvre just leaving the FR communist party of which he was the central
theorist till 1958, both directly master in Marxism to Debord and in
sociology to Baudrillard, you would know of the different approaches of the
daily life from these meetings..

All the question of the thesis by Baudrillard's is a tribute to the new
Marxism in the sixties coming from the predictable transformation of the
system of the equivalence of the value trough the increasing system of the
commodity more the increasing importance of the general equivalence (money
getting out of equivalence with the gold in these years). What is not the
proper object at Debord, whose research concerns the subject in space time
as spectacle coming from the commodity, not the abstract question of the
value.

Baudrillard worked for the beginning on the proper statement of the
commodity from the system of equivalence of the value crossing the
sociology.

Baudrillard had worked with Barthes, a great Marxist having written "Le
système de la mode" from an idea at Simondon's on the individuation
attributed to the industrial objects.

At least has transferred a semiotic approach to political philosophy that
could run much more far for struggle than the system of the spectacle which
is closed at the moment the entropy is realized.

>From the system of equivalence of the value he has observed the problematic
of the language and their inherit significations can working as well in
political economy as well in political philosophy. From this point both
more: having observed that the system of equivalence was concretely
disappearing, he had the genial idea to apply to theory of the signs to the
emergent theory of the post the production (the signs emerging from the
disappearance of the symbolic relationship) the statement of the concept
from Saussure having worked till the linguistic structuralism: arbitrary
statement of the sign regarding its concrete referent...

An so on

On 14/03/07 18:13, "Keith Sanborn" <mrzero at panix.com> probably wrote:

> I find myself very much in Sympathy w/ Mr. Esche. Baudrillard's work was
> essentially a collection of bitter lesser footnotes to Debord. If you know
> Debord you realize B's references even through the haze of weak translation. B
> set himself up as a kind of Nietzschean destoyer of accepted French left
> political values, but he only managed to be an apologist for a lack of values.
> His views of the US are the smug colonialism typical of upper middle brow
> European intellos. His use as a justification for Peter Halleyism in the 80s
> was at least as debased and fashion conscious as his use by the British art
> world.
> 
> I did not mourn for Ronald Reagan; I do no mourn for Baudrillard.
> 
> Keith Sanborn
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> 
> From:  idc-request at mailman.thing.net
> Subj:  iDC Digest, Vol 29, Issue 21
> Date:  Wed Mar 14, 2007 12:49 pm
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> Today's Topics:
> 
>    1. Re: Some thoughts on Jean Baudrillard and cultural studies
>       (Charles Esche)
>    2. RE: Some thoughts on Jean Baudrillard and cultural studies
>       (Judith Rodenbeck)
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 10:41:04 +0100
> From: Charles Esche <charles.esche at vanabbe.nl>
> Subject: Re: [iDC] Some thoughts on Jean Baudrillard and cultural
> studies
> To: iDC <idc at bbs.thing.net>
> Message-ID: <357CC7DA-F367-437D-9BB9-1B8247CC50ED at vanabbe.nl>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> I've been a lurker all this time, fascinated by the discussions at
> times and always happy with the dynamism of the conversation. So,
> thank you to all. For the record, I am responsible for a middle sized
> museum in the Netherlands that I am trying to equip as a more
> politically and locally engaged institution and co-editor of Afterall
> Books that are quite widely distributed.
> 
> Trebor asked me to respond to Baudrillard, something I don't feel
> able to do in detail but this critical turn in the conversation is
> refreshing - we certainly do not need encomiums.
> 
> It seems to me that Baudrillard's influence is almost entirely
> negative on all forms of emancipatory thinking. If we are looking for
> a critique of economic conditions in the world, of representation, of
> simulation than we cannot find it here. Even if his basic position
> were as an engaged world citizen who did acknowledge the travails of
> people who are powerless to shield themselves from the consequences
> of a world of simulacra - as I am sure he was as a human. It is the
> use and effect of his work that has to be judged. Here his apparent
> resigned, cynical indifference to the fate of the world and its
> inhabitants permitted a use of his writeings that is largely
> unforgivable. His writings have given permission,certainly in the art
> world, for a similar cynicism and acceptance of the status quo as
> long as it works for one's personal benefit. I'm thinking for
> instance of his indirect but significant effect on the British
> Goldsmiths generation of the early 1990s. This elevation of personal
> interests and desires over collective or ideological concerns can be
> laid at his door, even if he only performed the role of convenient
> excuse for an always existing set of motivations. In is for his value
> as a legitimising agent that of the cynical new world order that I
> would reject him, not for his personal ethics, whatever they were.
> 
> I am showing an Allan Kaprow exhibition at the moment and the
> attempts by the estate (sadly) and the gallery (predictably) to
> aetheticise and depoliticise his work is at such a profound level
> that it beggars belief. I see the work of this significant artist
> during the long gone heyday of American experimentalism dying before
> my eyes. It is true that it has become a simulacrum but that
> knowledge does absolutely nothing for me...and nor does any of the
> rest of his thought.
> 
> Charles
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> Dear Charlie, everyone -
>> 
>> This is damn interesting for an outsider:
>> 
>>> One of the more depressing aspects of teaching cultural studies is
>>> the
>>> degree to which it becomes increasingly self-referential. Theory
>>> is used
>>> to teach students how to analyse media products and advertising. The
>>> choice of which such products and advertising are chosen to be
>>> analysed
>>> rests almost entirely on the degree to which they seem fit for such
>>> analysis. The same students then go and work in advertising and
>>> media,
>>> producing exactly the kind of products that can be, and in fact are
>>> designed to be analysed using the same theoretical techniques they
>>> themselves learnt as students.
>> 
>> I actually don't watch TV but I have noticed this kind of thing
>> quite a bit on the billboard advertisements here in France, and
>> also in American movies. A weird demand for theoretical
>> interpretation that's basically going to generate a lot of
>> lingering over the image in question. What's impressive is the way
>> the academic relation becomes a kind of social law, not in a hard
>> authoritarian sense, but as a kind of repetition compulsion that
>> adds another layer to the usual dreck. Honestly (I don't mean any
>> personal offense) despite what seemed like the great initial
>> promise I always really disliked the overall effect of cultural
>> studies, because it seemed to me it legitimated what I still
>> consider dreck, all the garbage on TV etc., actually stuff like the
>> Inman show you talk about in your post, which we were told was real
>> life after all, made by real people after all, and full of all
>> these nuances which, though of course compromised and needful of
>> interpretation, were still really our culture, the only one we
>> have, stuff that matters. So linger over it. Baudrillard was pretty
>> much the perfect capper to that kind of story, because he said,
>> well, if you take a very distant view, everyone is totally
>> hypnotized! With no possible escape! So you might as well get into it!
>> 
>> I think commercial culture is a very effective ideology, and the
>> best thing one can do is turn it off and focus on more important
>> problems, and more intense pleasures too. I don't think we're all
>> hypnotized but I do think there's a lot of noxious effects from the
>> efforts of a gigantic advertising industry that deeply influences
>> most media production. It's actually one of the important problems!
>> I am curious whether a reflection like yours above is widespread
>> among your peers, whether there is maybe something new on the
>> horizon? Have people written about this loop you describe? Is there
>> a cure for this circular malady?
>> 
>> all the best, Brian Holmes
>> 
>> 
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> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 09:58:09 -0400
> From: "Judith Rodenbeck" <jrodenbe at slc.edu>
> Subject: RE: [iDC] Some thoughts on Jean Baudrillard and cultural
> studies
> To: "'iDC'" <idc at bbs.thing.net>
> Message-ID: <00d901c76640$ccb91450$0202a8c0 at rodenbeck>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
> 
> Charles Esche wrote:
> 
>> I am showing an Allan Kaprow exhibition at the moment and the
>> attempts by the estate (sadly) and the gallery (predictably) to
>> aetheticise and depoliticise his work is at such a profound level
>> that it beggars belief. I see the work of this significant artist
>> during the long gone heyday of American experimentalism dying before
>> my eyes. It is true that it has become a simulacrum but that
>> knowledge does absolutely nothing for me...and nor does any of the
>> rest of his thought.
> 
> I'd be curious to have more detail. Allan was a slippery fellow, both
> anti-aesthetic and profoundly formalist, a deep anarchist and very
> comfortably middle-class. He would have said the work was already dead the
> minute it was over; but then towards the end of his life he got interested
> in remakes (or retakes), not a la Abramovic re-do but in re-thinks. The
> problem, for an un-artist interested in blurring, became one of legacy. And
> Allan, always interested in gossip, transmission, and legend (like Pecos
> Bill) would (did) welcome a certain contentious confusion.
> 
> On the iDC reception of Baudrillard, I am in some sympathy with William
> Merrin. Derrida wrote a little book, The Ear of the Other, on Nietszche that
> seems a propos, about the necessity of careful distinction between a text
> and its reception. We're moving out of the foggy haze of a certain early
> 1990s theory fetishism (or at least substituting new Proper Names--Agamben,
> Ranciere, who this year supplant Hardt and Negri--for the old ones), but
> that's no reason to forget how productive certain analyses were in their
> moment, or how useful certain concepts--sign-exchange value, for
> example--still are.
> 
> Judith
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
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