Quite the Contrary

Thank you, Ken Rufo, for contributing to this course so we can better understand Jean Baudrillard. It seems to me like Baudrillard stated a couple things over his lifetime that he later rethought about. Instead of seeing this as a fault, I give a theorist more credit for thinking critically about their own thoughts enough to jump to and from different pools of theories.

I have to agree with Baudrillard in his work Political Economy of the Sign that Marx “goofs up, badly” when he assumes that in the absence of a capitalist regime a laborer will work because he enjoys being useful. Instead of focusing on the production of goods, Baudrillard argues for the focus to be on the consumption. When we have a lack of competition and the laborer works because he enjoys it, all we have left is production. Baudrillard says that capitalism does not care about the production of goods but instead cares about how many goods are being consumed. So if capitalism does care about production at all it is only that production keeps producing so more and more can be consumed.

After Ken mentioned the “L’Esprit du Terrorisme” I decided to read the work. It is easy to point the finger at Baudrillard after reading this text and say he is anti-American – but let’s look at the bigger picture, the man makes some great points. He says that when we think of terrorism, we think of America and Islam because we have a visual confrontation and we are able to make this idea of terrorism concrete. He argues that terrorism is not a clash of cultures, and is not limited to America and Islam.

He focuses on America because of the attack on September 11th and because we are a hegemonic super-power. Baudrillard says that now that we are a single world order, we find ourselves “grappling with antagonistic forces diffused throughout the very heart of the global itself, present in all contemporary convulsions.” For instance, he mentions that if Islam were the super-power, Islam would have a terrorist problem. The attack on September 11th was not so much a personal attack on the United States as much as it was an attack against globalization.

I would like to end my post with the most interesting and thought-provoking quote in “L’Esprit du Terrorisme.” Baudrillard states, “We naively believe that the progress of Good, its climb to power in all areas (science, technique, democracy, rights of man) corresponds to a defeat of Evil. Nobody seems to have understood that Good and Evil climb to power at the same time and in the same move. The triumph of the one does not imply the vanquishing of the other; indeed it is quite the contrary.” I would like to know what people think of this quote, whether they have read Baudrillard’s work, or, more interestingly, they haven’t.

Tissues of Culture

Roland Barthes, in his text “The Death of the Author,” explains that we have the idea of the author due to our capitalist ideology and positivism (belief in one truth). Barthes is a cultural materialist. Cultural materialism is concerned with how we work within a power that limits us, and how we affect it. For example, the power imposed on us can be seen as capitalist hegemony. We are surrounded by its power and we can move and have freedom within it. Cultural materialism is concerned about how we work in this system. So the author is used as a type of power imposed on us over the text. Barthes is interested in how we work to interpret within this limiting power the idea of the author has over us. He explains that the author is, linguistically, “never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a ‘subject’, not a ‘person’, and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language ‘hold together’…” The I is not a person, his physical self, but instead is a combination of all the ideologies power has imposed on us. Therefore when the author writes, it is not his own ideas being shared, but instead cultural ideology. The “text is a tissue of quotation drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.” Barthes explains that the authors ideas are not truly his own. He is merely writing his thoughts down from a “ready-formed dictionary” that has already been created for us.

Culture Cat explains in her blog http://culturecat.net/node/575:
Barthes argues that texts consist of "multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation." The field of composition has moved from the understandingof authorship as a solitary act resulting in a product owned by an individual to an understanding of authorship as a weaving together of other texts the writer has read and voices he or she has heard in conversation.

This explanation is related to Barthes when he says that the text is just a tissue of quotations and signs drawn from culture. The meaning of the work is always looked for in the idea of the author, a single voice of a person, in the text. This is not what we should be concerned with, Barthes says. The single voice of a person does not exist in the text. It is what is underlying in our culture, the ideology of power such as capitalism.

...Exploding the Beams Supporting the Shafts...

I would like to begin this film response with a quote from the beginning of the documentary Derrida.
“…work of miners who explode the beams supporting the shafts”
I thought this was a clever way to describe Derrida’s work and development of deconstructionism. I like to think of the text as a mining shaft and Derrida as the miner that destroys the support in the shaft. Instead of searching for unity and symmetry in the text as structuralism does, Derrida searches for the contradictions of the text. He reads “against the grain” and takes apart the structure of the text to find what it is saying and not saying. Therefore, he explodes the beams supporting what we thought the text was before searching for inconsistency and contradiction.

To say that Derrida has a “different” way of analyzing not only text, but life, would be an understatement. I must say, however, that the man makes sense. I particularly like his thoughts about love. Derrida asks if we love someone for who they are or for what they are. It would seem that the answer for many would be we love the “who” of a person, but Derrida makes a convincing argument that when love is lost, it is often for the things that a person is and is not. Therefore, the argument remains open, although I got the feeling through the documentary that Derrida believes in the “what” concerning love. In correlation with Derrida's theory of the "what" and love, he explains that love is narcissistic. Narcissism is a person's concern with his or her self, and love is narcissistic because it looks for the "what" in other people. They look for qualities that fulfill their own needs in a relationship. If one doesn't agree with this theory, he/she only needs to go to eharmony.com and search the profiles of people searching for potential life partners (their success may depend on whether the other person enjoys dogs, hiking, or goes to bed too late). Internet dating websites are a perfect example of Derrida's concern with love and narcissism.

I am more interested than anything about Derrida’s pessimistic views concerning forgiveness. The easier forgiveness is to give, the less it means in form. The harder it would be to give, the more meaningful it is. Derrida says that because of these truths, true or ‘pure’ forgiveness is impossible to give. If the forgiveness is given with the promise of change and repenting, the forgiveness is directed at a subject and not at the person being forgiven. Therefore, there is no true forgiveness. Derrida’s argument makes sense. I think this is a very negative way of thinking but nonetheless a fascinating thought by a fascinating man.

The Difficulties of Speech

The documentary Derrida's attempt to engage Derrida in an interview is ironic and entertaining to say the least. The philosopher has written many books and essays explaining deconstruction, and he makes it very obvious that he disagrees with the entire interview process. Why?

Thinking back to Saussure and his theory, he states in Course in General Linguistics that linguistics exist in two forms: speech and writing, and the latter’s only purpose is to assist the first. Saussure’s structuralist idea troubles Derrida. In Of Grammatology, he argues that the written word is of equal, if not more importance to language.

So, during the interview process, is it possible that Derrida is bothered by explaining his thoughts out loud, as if it will reach an audience more effectively than if he wrote them down?

He states in the documentary Derrida multiple times that the documentary and interview process is not natural, and even goes so far to mention that if the film crew was not there he would not have changed out of his pajamas all day. He has trouble answering personal questions, perhaps because he would rather his work be taken in without the idea of the individual “Derrida” interfering. Derrida makes it clear that he would rather speak about his ideas concerning death, loss, mourning, etc. instead of focusing on his personal life as a philosopher. Whatever Jacques Derrida decided to answer in the documentary, the very notion of Derrida opposing the interview process will assist me and many others in following readings concerning deconstructionism.