Whoa

I'd like to begin this post by thanking Ken Rufo for his fantastic post about Jean Baudrillard, taking very complicated and apparently 'meaningless' ideas, and making them understandable to a non-theorist. The section that I was most interested in was his discussion of Baudrillard's ideas about other theories, such as Marxism or psychoanalysis as simulated models that actually invent what they claim to discover.

This is an idea that I have been grappling with throughout the entire semester, the idea that these men, as we've only read men so far, simply discovered these abstract ideas out of thin air, and didn't invent them to promote their ideas. Rufo's post specifically references Baudrillard's criticism of psychoanalysis' claim of discovering the unconscious, when he felt that the unconscious was invented and used to further ideas that psychoanalysts wished to push forward. These are ideas that I have always had about theory both prior to and during this class. While I have to admit that much of that was due to my own lack of knowledge and understanding of these complex ideas, and I am beginning to realize that these ideas can be useful in at the very least questioning human existence, it still must be brought up that these are mostly invented ideas, not essential truths about human nature.

However, I also couldn't help but stop and think how Baudrillard could possibly make these claims about other theories and theorists, or the language they use, while he was in essence doing the same thing. While I understand he was proposing different ideas, it was still theory and anyone could make the same claim against him, that he was inventing ideas and concepts that he claimed were natural. Yet I need to move on, as Baudrillard is a theorist who I enjoy and think proposes some very interesting ideas particularly his most famous ideas, those of the simulacra and simulation.

My first introduction to Baudrillard was last semester in regards to Don Delillo's novel White Noise. In it is a scene when the main character goes to look at the 'most photographed barn in America', a completely inauthentic experience. Knowing that this barn is supposed to be the quintessiential barn, the perfect photograph, you can no longer actually see the barn, but only the idea of the barn. What you are actually seeing is the barn in reference to it as a photograph, there is no authenticity to the true object you are seeing, because you can never see it for what it truly is, it is a simulation of the real. Rufo makes this point in his post as well, using the example of waiting in line for the ET ride at Universal Studios, which goes a step further than the barn example. While waiting in line you're placed in a re-creation of the forest from the movie ET, so you are in a re-creation of a representation of a forest, all while thinking you are experiencing something real, something authentic. When you really think about that, it's mind-blowing, how deep the simulation can go, and how far removed they are from a 'real' thing.

Finally, I just have to comment on how astonished I was when reading Baudrillard's obituary from the Chronicle of Higher Education and how unbelievably venomous it was. While it has to be understood that this sort of writing isn't for everyone I just couldn't believe that some of that article ever got published, particularly after the man had just died. While I understand there was some lingering animosity towards Baudrillard in the United States over his writings regarding the Gulf War and September 11th, the fact that a publication of higher education would stoop to that level boggles my mind. It just served as an example to me that a lot of people do regularly engage themselves in reading these kinds of works, and apparently people have much stronger opinions on them than I have yet to form.