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Jean Baudrillard is dead

Jean Baudrillard is dead

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Jean Baudrillard is dead.

Horrible, terrible news. We were going to see him this summer.

I will write something about Baudrillard’s enormous influence on me, my thinking, and my life tomorrow. Perhaps I will be able to think more clearly then.

Tonight, I can only grieve. Tears keep falling, falling. I can’t process this at all. I am devastated.

Oh, Jean. Farewell, dear one.

“Contagion is not merely active within each system; it operates between systems.”

“Consider the recent release of an informational diskette on AIDS which was itself infected by a computer virus.”

“The real does no concede anything to the benefit of the imaginary: it concedes only to the benefit of the more real than real (the hyperreal) and to the more true than true. This is simulation. Presence is not effaced by a void, but by a redoubling of presence that effaces the opposition between presence and absence. Nor is a void effaced by fullness, but rather by repletion and saturation, by a plenitude greater than fullness.”

“For the problem, the only problem, is: where did Evil go? And the answer is: everywhere—because in a society which seeks—by prophylactic measures, by annihilating its own natural referents, by whitewashing violence, by exterminating all germs and all of the accursed share, by performing cosmetic surgery on the negative—to concern itself solely with quantified management and with the discourse of the Good, in a society where it is no longer possible to speak Evil, Evil has metamorphosed into all the viral and terroristic forms that obsess us.”

“If AIDS, terrorism, economic collapse and electronic viruses are concerns not just for the police, medicine, science and the experts, but for the entire collective imagination, this is because there is more to them than mere episodic events in an irrational world. They embody the entire logic of the system, and are merely, so to speak, the points at which that logic crystallizes spectacularly. Their power is a power of irradiation and their effect, through the media, within the imagination, is itself a viral one. They are immanent phenomena which are all related to each other; they obey the same protocol of virulance and have contamination effects way beyond their actual impact.”

(Thank you, Joseph, for delivering this sad message).

Theoryheads and Postmodernism

Theoryheads and Postmodernism

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I’ve added a new page – “About VirusHead.”

There is a short explanation of why the blog is named VirusHead.

There is also a long rambling section about theoryheads and postmodernism (only for the intensely curious).

I’ve also added a page dedicated to Jehovah’s Witnesses issues, news and resources. In addition to page links (to bits of the main VirusHead site), the page lists all the titles of the blog posts on this topic, so that you don’t have to click through the category pages to get a sense of what’s there.

I’ve also moved my tag cloud to its own page, which includes all the tags. All of them.

Absence of the social

Absence of the social

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Jean Baudrillard, one of my all-time fave thinkers, has written a short piece on the torched cars and ransacked schools of France. "The Pyres of Autumn" argues that these events (among other things) call attention to the actual lack of a meanful social culture. He describes the ideological bankruptcy of the West as a "banalized, technized, upholstered way of life, carefully shielded from self-questioning." What does national belonging really mean, and how does one have a sense of it today?

All the excluded, the disaffiliated, whether from the banlieues, immigrants or ‘native-born’, at one point or another turn their disaffiliation into defiance and go onto the offensive. It is their only way to stop being humiliated, discarded or taken in hand. In the wake of the November fires, mainstream political sociology spoke of integration, employment, security. I am not so sure that the rioters want to be reintegrated on these lines. Perhaps they consider the French way of life with the same condescension or indifference with which it views theirs. Perhaps they prefer to see cars burning than to dream of one day driving them. Perhaps their reaction to an over-calculated solicitude would instinctively be the same as to exclusion and repression.

The superiority of Western culture is sustained only by the desire of the rest of the world to join it. When there is the least sign of refusal, the slightest ebbing of that desire, the West loses its seductive appeal in its own eyes. Today it is precisely the ‘best’ it has to offer — cars, schools, shopping centres — that are torched and ransacked. Even nursery schools: the very tools through which the car-burners were to be integrated and mothered. ‘Screw your mother’ might be their organizing slogan. And the more there are attempts to ‘mother’ them, the more they will. Of course, nothing will prevent our enlightened politicians and intellectuals from considering the autumn riots as minor incidents on the road to a democratic reconciliation of all cultures. Everything indicates that on the contrary, they are successive phases of a revolt whose end is not in sight.

It might be time for a cultural revolution. The counter-cultural revolution didn’t adhere – money beat love.

I see the horrible resurgence of the non-compassionate, non-christian Christian right as another symptom of this. The riots on the cartoons take hold for similar reasons. The need to hold onto the familiar, no matter how cruel, is a last-gasp measure. Does anyone really believe in rule by mob? Myself, I do not believe that Allah, Jehovah, or being-who-cannot-be-named would approve in the slightest.

I hope there is an alternative to all of this greed and hatred. I hope that we discover it (again?) soon.