Massumi, discusses Deleuze and Guattarti in relation to Baudrillards Simalcrum, suggesting that the idea of reality being displaced by a simulation misses the point that all there has been have been simulations... he gives the example of Wine - the pervasive alcohol and it's creation of the "emotional reality" in the film Vendémiaire
The film is bracketted by grapes. The grape harvest supplies the initial motivation that sets up the situation of the plot, and the grapes themselves rather than any human hero resolve the dilemma.
The undivided, abstract flow of wine is the glorified body of the nation. It arrogates to itself the power of love, victory and rebirth. It presents itself as first and final cause.
The undivided, abstract flow of wine is the glorified body of the nation. It arrogates to itself the power of love, victory and rebirth. It presents itself as first and final cause. But the war was obviously not won with wine. Its causality is an illusion. But it is an effective illusion because it is reinjected into reality and sets to work: it expresses love, and thereby motivates the man to be a good husband and give sons to the nation rising; it expresses patriotism, and thereby spurs the soldiers to victory. That is why it is called a quasi-cause. It abstracts from bodies and things a transcendental plane of ideal identities: a glorious wife, a glorious family, a glorious nation. ("It carries the real beyond its principle...") Then it folds that ideal dimension back down onto bodies and things in order to force them to conform to the distribution of identities it lays out for them. ("...to the point where it is effectively produced.") It creates the entire network of resemblance and representation. Both copy and model are the products of the same fabulatory process, the final goal of which is the recreation of the earth, the creation of a new territory.
The power of the quasi-cause is essentially distributive. It separates the good bodies from the bad, in other words the bodies that agree to resemble the glorious illusion it presents them as a model from those that do not; and it polices for renegade copies operating with a different agenda. The quasi-cause enables the French patriots to unmask the conniving Germans,19 and it shows up the gypsie for the true, hard-working Frenchwoman that she is despite her apparent otherness.
"And so we gape. We cannot be said to be passive exactly, because all polarity, including the active/passive dichotomy, has disappeared. We have no earth to center us, but we ourselves function as a ground--in the electrical sense.8 We do not act, but neither do we merely receive. We absorb through our open eyes and mouths. We neutralize the play of energized images in the mass entropy of the silent majority."
It makes for a fun read. But do we really have no other choice than being a naive realist or being a sponge?Deleuze and Guattari open a third way. Although it is never developed at length in any one place, a theory of simulation can be extracted from their work that can give us a start in analyzing our cultural condition under late capitalism without landing us back with the dinosaurs or launching us into hypercynicism."
The work of Baudrillard is one long lament. Both linear and dialectical causality no longer function, therefore everything is indetermination. The center of meaning is empty, therefore we are satellites in lost orbit. We can no longer act like legislator-subjects or be passive like slaves, therefore we are sponges. Images are no longer anchored by representation, therefore they float weightless in hyperspace. Words are no longer univocal, therefore signifiers slip chaotically over each other. A circuit has been created between the real and the imaginary, therefore reality has imploded into the undecidable proximity of hyperreality. All of these statements make sense only if it is assumed that the only conceivable alternative to representative order is absolute indetermination, whereas indetermination as he speaks of it is in fact only the flipside of order, as necessary to it as the fake copy is to the model, and every bit as much a part of its system. Baudrillard's framework can only be the result of a nostalgia forthe old reality so intense that it has difformed his vision of everything outside of it. He cannot clearly see that all the things he says have crumbled were simulacra all along: simulacra produced by analyzable procedures of simulation that were as real as real, or actually realer than real, because they carried the real back to its principle of production and in so doing prepared their own rebirth in a new regime of simulation. He cannot see becoming, of either variety. He cannot see that the simulacrum envelops a proliferating play of differences and galactic distances. What Deleuze and Guattari offer, particularly in A Thousand Plateaus, is a logic capable of grasping Baudrillard's failing world of representation as an effective illusion the demise of which opens a glimmer of possibility. Against cynicism, a thin but fabulous hope--of ourselves becoming realer than real in a monstrous contagion of our own making.
http://www.brianmassumi.com/textes/REALER%20THAN%20REAL.pdf
What to draw from this, it can be argued that reification is everywhere in capitalist culture, "emotional reality" has been reified onto alcohol, detournement is reduced to the "drunkards walk".... and reification is notoriously exclusive, you are only allowed in to "authenticity" if you have consumed the goods... those not in are assigned the role of the "other", with all that that implies... a recipe for conflict... (as experts we tend to be more willing to pin down the 'other', so we can neatly diagnose and prescribe, than ourselves...?)
Questions- Is Baudrillard positing a post-structural transgendered identity clash via hegemonic forces that create the passive observer and the hyper-active expressive, is this ADHD on a grand cultural scale, the collective conciouness swinging between capitalisms creation of mass introverted uncertainty and board room extroverted (alcohol driven?) artificial certainty and judgement? Once the line is drawn and the catageries are fixed predictions can be made and the lawyers can get to work making money out of the situation?, but was it created by and for the hegemonic forces at work in the institution (Foucault)? as a manifestation of the systems attempts to colonise the lifeworld (Habermas) with it's binary predictive apparatus and expertise? Who will protect us from the forces that threaten our future, from the "monstrous contagion", the colonisation with the profitable quasi-cause, of certainty and it's institutional manifestations (Foucault) Which comes first?
Of course the complexity has got completely out of hand .... and perhaps there is a reason for this
Does the institution thrive on complexity, mystification and confrontation?
Re - "we have no earth to center us" - We are the earth, the earth (Deleuze: bWo a whole rescued from that defined as parts (as body to hand))and the earth could be seen as the present moment we rest in and on, the earth is our shared heart...but as a shared inherent quality/identity it has to be denied/caricature by a "rational system" of production/consumption interested in its own exclusive competitive survival...at the expense of ?
perhaps we may regain/remember access through a sacred detournement? ( not only one profitably reified onto a specific form of "divine" communion, ) , but perhaps in exploring and celebrating the many possible ways of allowing our sensitivity to and re-identifying with to our inclusive soul, the earth, that is is our dynamic partner in performance not a 'dead material'? Perhaps via a simple inclusive randomness .. in a post modern world of narrative why not choose the inclusive simple option?
Necessarily pacifistic and inclusive is this our natural state?... and yet this includes the mistake... of modernity? with it's paranoia, and obsession with prediction and preemptive judgement? the simulcrum?. and of the various exclusive reactions to this.... but is not duped into closure and believing that is all there is from either direction ..... thereby it holds out the hope of a future in the unfolding present we all are and share...
.
No comments:
Post a Comment