The more I re-read this section of Baudrillard’s America the more I am reminded of the unfortunate time that I read Chromophobia. The over-analysis of a non-academic field through the eyes of an academic is absurd. Like trying to listen to music with a pair of binoculars.
The computer, the “video screen”, are not ideas in themselves but tools. And yet Baudriallard has divined meaning. Certainly a feat, but one usually reserved for those walking the streets with sandwich boards predicting apocalypse. Maybe he would be right at home in such a situation...
“[V]ideo or stereo culture is not a narcissistic imaginary, but an effect of frantic self-referentiality, a short-circuit which immediately hooks up like with like, and, in so doing, emphasizes their surface intensity and deeper meaninglessness.”
I feel like I’m falling down a rambling nihilistic chasm every time I read that.
In general Baudrillard treats old processes, updated with electronic means, as you would a typewriter that had somehow contracted a venereal disease. He refers to the academic “grappling with” a computer as engaging in “interminable psychoanalysis”. Baudrillard himself writes with what I can only assume is a stone tablet and chisel. Thoughts are carved down and he just keeps going. Looking back is no sort of option for the true philosopher. His publishers must have hated that.
Also... the “teenager / and his Walkman”? I know he was older when he wrote America, but this is about the most stereotypical thing he could have said, ever... Those teenagers and there newfangled Walkmen always desublimating their thoughts. On the whole Baudrillard sounds more alienated than objective. I have never found writings from an outside perspective particularly enlightening.
Regardless of what I just said, I found the idea of Polaroids as “ecstatic membranes” interesting. Instantaneous duplicate images are essentially brand new (last fifty years? thirty? eh). I don’t know what to think of that. In fact what I find remarkably interesting is that new technology can be considered ecstatic. I do not believe I have been able to experience this. No matter how fast technology sprints along I have not witnessed the development of something that changes our way of observing. I would like to.
No comments:
Post a Comment