/lit/ - Literature

>>12614567
where to start with baudrillard?

Here you go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U9WMftV40c

Postmodernism scoops up something of the material logic of advanced capitalism and turns this aggressively against its spiritual foundations. And in this it bears more than a passing resemblance to the structuralism which was one of its remote sources. It is though it is urging the system, like its great mentor Friedrich Nietzsche, to forget about its metaphysical foundations, acknowledge that God is dead and simply go relativist. Then, at least, it might trade a modicum of security for a degree of actuality. Why not just confess that your values are as precariously ungrounded as anybody else's? It would hardly leave you vulnerable to attack, since you have just craftily demolished any vantage-point from which any offensive might be launched. In any case, the kind of values which are rooted in what you do, which reflect the unvarnished social reality rather than the high-falutin moral ideal, are likely to be a good deal more cogent than a lot of nebulous talk about progress, reason or God's special affection for the nation.

But it is all very well for pragmatist philosophers to argue this way. Those who bear the burden of running the system are aware that ideologies are in business to legitimate what you do, not just reflect it. They simply cannot dispense with these high-sounding rationales, not least because a great many people still credit them, indeed cling to them ever more tenaciously as they feel the ground shifting beneath their feet. The commodity, pace Adorno, cannot be its own ideology, at least not yet. One could imagine a future phase of the system which this would be true, in which it had taken a course at some North American university, desperately or cheerfully jettisoned its own foundations and left behind it the whole business of rhetorical legitimation. Indeed there are those that claim that this is precisely what is afoot today: that 'hegemony' is no longer important, that the system does not care whether we believe in it or not, that it has no need to secure our spiritual complicity as long as we do more or less what it demands. But postmodernism in this respect belongs to a transitional era, one in which the metaphysical, like some unquiet ghost, can neither resuscitate itself nor decently die. If it could manage to lapse from being, then no doubt postmodernism would pass away with it.

The greatest test of postmodernism is how it would shape up to fascism. Its rich body of work on racism and ethnicity, on the paranoia of identity-thinking, on the perils of totality and the fear of otherness: all this, along with its deepened insights into the cunning of power, would no doubt be of considerable value. But its cultural relativism and moral conventionalism, its skepticism, pragmatism and localism, its distaste for ideas of solidarity and disciplined organization, its lack of any adequate theory of political agency: all these would tell heavily against it.