Blog: June

Postmodern philosopy

...Now, one must conceive of TV along the lines of DNA as an effect in which the opposing poles of determination vanish, according to a nuclear contraction, retraction, of the old polar schema that always maintained a minimal distance between cause and effect, between subject and object: precisely the distance of meaning, the gap, the difference, the smallest possible gap (PPEP!), irreducible under pain of reabsorption into an aleatory and indeterminate process whose discourse can no longer account for it, because it is itself a determined order. It is this gap that vanishes in the process of genetic coding, in which indeterminacy is not so much a question of molecular randomness as of the abolition, pure and simple, of the relation. In the process of molecular control, which "goes" from the DNA nucleus to the "substance" that it "informs," there is no longer the traversal of an effect, of an energy, of a determination, of a message. "Order, signal, impulse, message": all of these attempt to render the thing intelligible to us, but by analogy, retranscribing in terms of inscription, of a vector, of decoding, a dimension of which we know nothing--it is no longer even a "dimension," or perhaps it is the fourth (which is defined, however, in Einsteinian relativity by the absorption of the distinct poles of space and time). In fact, this whole process can only be understood in its negative form: nothing separates one pole from another anymore, the beginning from the end; there is a kind of contradiction of one over the other, a fantastic telescoping, a collapse of the two traditional poles into each other: implosion--an absorption of the radiation mode of causality, of the differential mode of determination, with its positive and negative charge--an implosion of meaning. That is where simulation begins. [p.31]
Simulacra and Simulation
Jean Baudrillard

Posted on:
2008.06.24 -0500

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Say again, Baudrillard

"[...] But it would be enthralling to consider this hypothesis [that "information dissolves meaning", that "it devours its own content"] even within the parameters of cybernetic information theory. There also, the fundamental thesis [which?] calls for this information to be synonymous to negentropy, with the resistance of entropy, with an excess of meaning and organization. But it would be useful to posit the opposite hypothesis: INFORMATION = ENTROPY." [p.86]
Simulacra and Simulation (1985)
Jean Baudrillard

It is passages like these that make Baudrillard's writing very suspect. What is he trying to say? Maybe he is not really trying to say anything very specific, but rather, like a poet, is trying to place the reader in a space for a multiplicity of interpretations, a space of wonder, of bewilderment. Maybe Baudrillard's fascination with McLuhan's "the medium is the message" is more than a fetish, it is a goal. Maybe, like McLuhan's light bulb ("a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence." --Understanding Media [p.8]), Baudrillard's text also creates an "environment" by way of his very particular organization of lexical tokens.

Posted on:
2008.06.06 -0500

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