Mary Worth & French Postmodernism: 2/3/22

 

Mary Worth & French Postmodernism: 1/30/22

"The reabsorption of critical negativity is echoed by an even more radical form of denial: the denial of reality.

In simulation, you move beyond true and false through parody, masquerade, derision to form an immense enterprise of deterrence. Deterrence from every historical reference, from all reality in the passage into signs. This strategy of destabilization, of discrediting, of divestment from reality in the form of parody, mockery, or masquerade becomes the very principle of government, is also a depreciation of all value.

The question is no longer of a power or a 'political' power connected to a history, to forms of representation, to contradictions and a critical alternative. Representation has lost its principle and the democratic illusion is complete--not as much by the violation of rights as by the simulation of values, general uncertainty and the derealization of all reality. Everyone is caught in the signs of power that occupy the entire space--and that are shared by everyone communally (take for example the resigned, embarrassed complicity in the rigged workings of the political sphere and polls).

From there, the system works exponentially:

--not starting from value, but from the liquidation of value.
--not through representation, but through the liquidation of representation.
--not from reality but from the liquidation of reality.

Everything in the name of which domination was exercised is terminated, sacrificed, which should logically lead to the end of domination. This is indeed the case, but for the sake of hegemony.

The system doesn't care a fig for laws; it unleashes deregulation in every domain.

--Deregulation of value in speculation.
--Deregulation of representation in the various form of manipulation and parallel networks.
--Deregulation of reality through information, the media, and virtual reality.

From that point on: total immunity--one can no longer counter the system in the name of one's own principles since the system has abolished them. The end of all critical negativity. Closure of every account and all history. The reign of hegemony.
[...]
The most serious of all forms of self-denial--not only economically or politically but metaphysically--is the denial of reality. This immense enterprise of deterrence from every historical reference, this strategy of discrediting, of divesting from reality in the form of parody, mockery, or masquerade, becomes the very principle of government. The new strategy--and it truly is a mutation--is the self-immolation of value, of every system of value, of self-denial, in differentiation, rejection and nullity as the triumphant command."

-Jean Baudrillard, The Agony of Power

Mary Worth & French Postmodernism: 1/9/22

"At the supreme moment of the crisis, the very instant when reciprocal violence is abruptly transformed into unanimous violence, the two faces of violence seem to be juxtaposed; the extremes meet. The surrogate victim serves as catalyst in this metamorphosis. And in performing this function he seems to combine in his person the most pernicious and most beneficial aspect of violence. He becomes the incarnation, as it were, of a game men feign to ignore, one whose basic rules are indeed unknown to them: the game of their own violence.

It is not enough to say that the surrogate victim 'symbolizes' the change from reciprocal violence and destruction to unanimous accord and construction; after all, the victim is directly responsible for this change and is an integral part of the process. From the purely religious point of view, the surrogate victim--or, more simply, the final victim--inevitably appears as a being who submits to violence without provoking a reprisal; a supernatural being who sows violence to reap peace; a mysterious savior who visits affliction on mankind in order subsequently to restore it to good health.

To our modern way of thinking a hero cannot be 'good' without ceasing to be 'evil,' and vice versa. Religious empiricism sees matters in a different light; in a sense, it confines itself to recording events as it sees them. Oedipus is initially an evil force and subsequently a beneficial one. It is not a question of 'exonerating' him, because the question of blaming him, in the modern moralistic sense of the term, never arises.

[...]

The beneficial Oedipus at Colonus supersedes the earlier, evil Oedipus, but he does not negate him. How could he negate him, since it was the expulsion of a guilty Oedipus that prompted the departure of violence? The peaceful outcome of his expulsion confirms the justice of the sentence passed on him, his unanimous conviction for patricide and incest.

If Oedipus is indeed the savior of the community, it is because he is a patricidal and incestuous son."

-René Girard, Violence and the Sacred

Mary Worth & French Postmodernism: 12/22/21

"The mechanism of reciprocal violence can be described as a vicious circle. Once a community enters the circle, it is unable to extricate itself. We can define this circle in terms of vengeance and reprisals, and we can offer diverse psychological descriptions of these reactions.

As long as a working capital of accumulated hatred and suspicion exists at the center of the community, it will continue to increase no matter what men do. Each person prepares himself for the probable aggression of his neighbors and interprets his neighbor's preparations as confirmation of the latter's aggressiveness. In more general terms, the mimetic character of violence is so intense that once violence is installed in a community, it cannot burn itself out.

To escape from the circle it is necessary to remove from the scene all those forms of violence that tend to become self-propagating and to spawn new, imitative forms.

When a community succeeds in convincing itself that one alone of its number is responsible for the violent mimesis besetting it; when it is able to view this member as the single 'polluted' enemy who is contaminating the rest; and when the citizens are truly unanimous in this conviction--then the belief becomes a reality, for there will no longer exist elsewhere in the community a form of violence to be followed or opposed, which is to say, imitated and propagated.

In destroying the surrogate victim, men believe that they are ridding themselves of some present ill. And indeed they are, for they are effectively doing away with those forms of violence that beguile the imagination and provoke emulation."

-René Girard, Violence and the Sacred

Mary Worth & French Postmodernism: 12/14/21

"First International Bank. Crocker Bank. Bank of America. Pentecostal Savings (or is that one a church?). All bunched together in the heart of the city, alongside the big airlines.

Money is fluid. Like grace, it is never yours. Coming to claim it is an offence against the divinity. Have you deserved this favour? Who are you and what are you going to do with it? You are suspected of wanting to put it to some use, and an evil one no doubt, whereas money is so beautiful in the fluid and intemporal state it is in at the bank, when it is being invested rather than spent. Shame on you and kiss the hand that gives it to you.

It is true that ownership of money burns your fingers, like power. We need people to take this risk for us and we should be eternally grateful to them. This is why I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again. When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them? And yet the atmosphere in a bank is that of the confessional (there is no more kafkaesque situation): admit that you have money, confess that this is not normal.

And it is true: having money is an awkward situation, from which the bank is only too happy to deliver you: 'Your money interests us'--the bank holds you to ransom, its greed knows no bounds. Its immodest gaze reveals your private parts to you, and you are forced to hand your money over to appease it.

One day I tried to close my account, taking all the money out in cash. The teller would not let me go with such a sum on me: it was obscene, dangerous, immoral. Would I not at least take travellers' checques? 'No, the whole lot in cash.' I was mad.

In America, you are stark raving mad if, instead of believing in money and its marvellous fluidity, you want to carry it round on you in banknotes. Money is dirty; that you must admit. And we really do need all these concrete and metal sanctuaries to protect us from it. So banks fulfill a crucial social function, and it is quite logical that these buildings should form the monumental heart of every town and city."

-Jean Baudrillard, America

Mary Worth & French Postmodernism: 12/14/21

"In order to grasp how globalization and global antagonism works, we should distinguish carefully between domination and hegemony. One could say that hegemony is the ultimate stage of domination and its terminal phase.

Domination is characterized by the master/slave relation, which is still a dual relation with potential alienation, a relationship of force and conflicts. It has a violent history of oppression and liberation. There are the dominators and the dominated--it remains a symbolic relationship. Everything changes with the emancipation of the slave and the internalization of the master by the emancipated slave. Hegemony begins here in the disappearance of the dual, personal, agonistic domination for the sake of integral reality--the reality of networks, of the virtual and total exchange where there are no longer dominators or dominated.

Indeed, it could be said that hegemony brings domination to an end. We, emancipated workers, internalize the Global Order and its operational setup of which we are the hostages far more than the slaves. Consensus, be it voluntary or involuntary, replaces traditional servitude, which still belongs to the symbolic register of domination.

[...]

Contrary to domination, a hegemony of world power is no longer a dual, personal or real form of domination, but the domination of networks, of calculation and integral exchange.

Domination can be overthrown from the outside. Hegemony can only be inverted or reversed from the inside.

[...]

We have here the profile of the new type of confrontation characterizing the era of Hegemony. It is not a class struggle or a fight for liberation on the global level (since the 'liberation' of exchange and democracy, which were the counterpoint to domination, are the strategies of hegemony). [...] It is an irreducibility, an irreducible antagonism to the global principle of generalized exchange.

In other words, a confrontation that is no longer precisely political but metaphysical and symbolic in the strong sense. It is a confrontation, a divide that exists not only at the heart of the dominant power, but at the heart of our individual existence."

-Jean Baudrillard, The Agony of Power

Mary Worth & French Postmodernism: 11/11/21

"Oh, dear. What is this...some kind of sing-off?"

-Mary Worth

Mary Worth & French Postmodernism: 11/10/21

"The reader will have recognized in this tale a number of familiar themes. All the people in the myth either disfigure others, demand that others disfigure themselves, try in vain to disfigure others, or actually disfigure themselves--all of which amounts ultimately to the same thing. One cannot exert violence without submitting to it: that is the law of reciprocity.

[...]

In the relationship between the two cousins the woman initially has the upper hand. She incarnates beauty, the man ugliness; she is free of desire, while he is caught in its thrall. The relationship is then reversed. Differences cancel each other out; a symmetry is constantly generated, invisible in each synchronic moment taken separately but visible in the accumulation of successive moments.

This is what constitutes the non-difference of the sacrificial crisis, a truth forever inaccessible to the two partners who live out the relationship in the form of alternating differences. The symmetry of the overall picture is reflected in the two sides of the face, each scarred in turn. The same details are reiterated throughout the story (until the conclusion), but never simultaneously.

Between the two cousins and Chief Pestilence's tribesmen there is the same relationship as that between the protagonists of Oedipus the King and the Theban plague victims. The only way to avoid contagion is to turn a deaf ear to the appeals of the enemy brothers.

On the level of the tribesmen--that is, the collectivity--the myth speaks objectively. It does what we ourselves did in our opening chapters: it 'shortcircuits' the alternating differences. It does so with good reason, for this difference only ends in similarity. The reciprocal mutation takes the direct form of a loss of differences, a 'becoming the same' at the hands of those whom violence has already made identical. When we note that this process consists of turning men into doubles as well as into monsters, it is clear that we are dealing here with a sacrificial crisis.

Mutilation symbolizes the working of the crisis in dramatic fashion. Clearly, it must be viewed both as the creation of fearfully deformed beings and as the elimination of all distinguishing characteristics, all the salient features of these beings. The process imposes uniformity and eliminates differences, but it never succeeds in establishing harmony.

In the image of monstrous mutilation the procedures of reciprocal violence are expressed in such a powerfully condensed form that they appear bizarre, indecipherable, and 'mythic.'"

-René Girard, Violence and the Sacred

Mary Worth & French Postmodernism: 11/08/21

 

"The top of the Bonaventure Hotel. Its metal structure and its plate-glass windows rotate slowly around the cocktail bar. The movement of the skyscrapers outside is almost imperceptible. Then you realize that it is the platform of the bar that is moving, while the rest of the building remains still. In the end I get to see the whole city revolve around the top of the hotel. A dizzy feeling, which continues inside the hotel as a result of its labyrinthine convolution. Is this still architecture, this pure illusionism, this mere box of spatio-temporal tricks? Lucid and hallucinogenic, is this post-modern architecture?

No interior/exterior interface. The glass facades merely reflect the environment, sending back its own image. This makes them much more formidable than any wall of stone. It's just like people who wear dark glasses. Their eyes are hidden and others see only their own reflection. Everywhere the transparency of interfaces ends in internal refraction. Everything pretentiously termed 'communication' and 'interaction'--Walkman, dark glasses, automatic household appliances, hi-tech cars, even the perpetual dialogue with the computer--ends up with each monad retreating into the shade of its own formula, into its self-regulating little corner and its artificial immunity. Blocks like the Bonaventure building claim to be perfect, self-sufficient miniature cities. But they cut themselves off from the city more than they interact with it. They stop seeing it. They refract it like a dark surface. And you cannot get out of the building itself. You cannot fathom its internal space, but it has no mystery; it is just like those games where you have to join all the dots together without any line crossing another. Here too everything connects, without any two pairs of eyes ever meeting.

It is the same outside. [...] They do not look at other people here. They are too much afraid they will throw themselves upon them with unbearable, sexual demands, requests for money or affection. Everything is charged with a somnambulic violence and you must avoid contact to escape its potential discharge. [...] Everything is so informal, there is so little in the way of reserve or manners (except for that eternal film of a smile, which offers only a very flimsy protection), that you feel anything could blow up at any moment. By some chain reaction, all this latent hysteria could be released at a stroke.

[...]

This is what the ideal city is like."

-Jean Baudrillard, America

Mary Worth & French Post-Modernism: 10/23/21

"Contemporary thought is in chaos, as it must be when progress is real. Where it still survives, it displays pathological symptoms. Thought, in fact, is caught up in a circle, the very circle drawn for us by Euripidean tragedy. In striving to escape from the circle, thought only enters more deeply into it, and as the radius of the circle shrinks, thought moves ever faster, spinning itself into an obsession.

[...]

Nothing now exists to interfere with a full revelation of violence--not even violence itself, which men and its own extraordinary growth have combined to deprive of that freedom of moment that formerly assured the efficiency of the generative mechanism and the repression of the truth. The trap that the Western Oedipus has set for himself will snap closed at the precise moment when the quest is finished, for trap and quest, here again, are one and the same thing.

Today the reign of violence is made manifest. It assumes the awesome and horrific form of technological weaponry. These weapons, as the 'experts' blandly inform us, are what is keeping the whole world more or less in line. The idea of 'limitless' violence, long scorned by sophisticated Westerners, suddenly looms up before us. Absolute vengeance, formerly the prerogative of the gods, now returns, precisely weighed and calibrated, on the wings of science. And it is this force, we are told, that prevents the first planetary society, the society that already encompasses or will encompass the whole of humanity, from destroying itself.

It seems increasingly clear that the pressure of violence or the insistence of truth (for whom man acts as a kind of torchbearer) has forced modern man to come face to face with this same violence or truth. For the first time he is confronted with a perfectly straightforward and even scientifically calculable choice between total destruction and the total renunciation of violence."

-René Girard, Violence and the Sacred

Mary Worth & French Post-Modernism: 10/14/21

"Americans believe in facts, but not in facticity. They do not know that facts are factitious, as their name suggests.

It is in this belief in facts, in the total credibility of what is done or seen, in this pragmatic evidence of things and an accompanying contempt for what may be called appearances or the play of appearances--a face does not deceive, behavior does not deceive, a scientific process does not deceive, nothing deceives, nothing is ambivalent (and at bottom this is true: nothing deceives, there are no lies, there is only simulation, which is precisely the facticity of facts)--that the Americans are a true utopian society, in their religion of the fait accompli, in the naivety of their deductions, in their ignorance of the evil genius of things.

You have to be utopian to think that in a human order, of whatever nature, things can be as plain and straightforward as that. All other societies contain within them some heresy or other, some dissidence, some kind of suspicion of reality, the superstitious belief in a force of evil and the possible control of that force by magic, a belief in the power of appearances.

Here, there is no dissidence, no suspicion. The emperor has no clothes; the facts are there before us."

-Jean Baudrillard, America

Mary Worth & French Post-Modernism: 09/30/21

"Tocqueville's central idea is that the spirit of America is to be found in its mode of life, in the revolution of mores, the moral revolution. This creates neither a new legality nor a new State, but it does create a practical legitimacy, a legitimacy grounded in the way of life. Salvation no longer has to do with the divine or the State, but with the ideal form of practical organization. Is this to be traced back to the secularization of conscience effected by Protestantism, to the introjection of divine jurisdiction into daily discipline? The fact is that religion has become part of everyday life, which means that it can no longer be challenged or questioned as to its bases, since it no longer has transcendent value. This is religion as way of life.

Similarly, politics has become part of everyday life--as pragmatic machine, as game, as interaction, as spectacle--which means that it can no longer be judged from a specifically political point of view. There is no ideological or philosophical principle of government any more. Things are at once both more naive and more conjectural.
[...]
Perhaps this successful revolution is no longer successful in the way Tocqueville understood it, as a spontaneous movement of the public mind, a form of spontaneous, concrete ordering of mores to modern values. It is not so much in the operation of institutions as in the freeing of technologies and images that the glorious form of American reality is to be found: in the immoral dynamic of images, in the orgy of goods and services, an orgy of power and useless energy (yet who can say where useful energy ends?), in which the spirit of advertising is more to the fore than Tocqueville's public spirit.

But these are, after all, the marks of its liberation, and the very obscenity of this society is the sign of its liberation. A liberation of all effects, some of them perfectly excessive and abject. But this is precisely the point: the high point of liberation, its logical outcome, is to be found in the spectacular orgy, speed, the instantaneity of change, generalized eccentricity. Politics frees itself in the spectacle, in the all-out advertising effect; sexuality frees itself in all its anomalies and perversions (including the refusal of sexuality, the latest fad, which is itself only a supercooling effect of sexual liberation); mores, customs, the body, and language free themselves in the ever quickening round of fashion. The liberated man is not the one who is freed in his ideal reality, his inner truth, or his transparency; he is the man who changes spaces, who circulates, who changes sex, clothes, and habits according to fashion, rather than morality, and who changes opinions not as his conscience dictates but in response to opinion polls. This is practical liberation whether we like it or not, whether or not we deplore its wastefulness and its obscenity. Moreover, people in 'totalitarian' countries know very well that this is true freedom and dream of nothing but fashion, the latest styles, idols, the play of images, travel for its own sake, advertising, the deluge of advertising. In short, the orgy.

Now, you have to admit that it is America which has concretely, technologically achieved this orgy of liberation, this orgy of indifference, disconnection, exhibition, and circulation. I do not know what remains of the successful revolution Tocqueville speaks of, the revolution of political freedom and of the quality of public spirit (in this regard America has both the best and the worst to offer), but it has certainly achieved this revolution."

-Jean Baudrillard, America

Mary Worth & French Post-Modernism: 12/04/2015

 

"Compiling inventories of everything, stocking everything, memorizing everything.

Hence the elephants enveloped in liquid bitumen, whose bones become fossilized in its black, mineral viscosity, together with the lions, mammoths, and wolves who roamed the plains of Los Angeles and were the first, prehistoric victims of the oil fields. Today they have all received a second embalming at Hancock Park in a museum devoted to the rote-learning of prehistory. And, in conformity with the prevailing moral code, all this is presented with conviction. Americans are people of conviction, convinced of everything and seeking to convince. One of the aspects of their good faith is this stubborn determination to reconstitute everything of a past and a history which were not their own and which they have largely destroyed or spirited away. Renaissance castles, fossilized elephants, Indians on reservations, sequoias as holograms, etc.

In storing details on their computers of all the known souls in the civilized (white) countries, the Mormons of Salt Lake City are behaving no differently from other Americans, who all share the same missionary spirit. It is never too late to revive your origins. It is their destiny: since they were not the first to be in on history, they will be the first to immortalize everything by reconstitution (by putting things in museums, they can match in an instant the fossilization process nature took millions of years to complete).

But the conception Americans have of the museum is much wider than our own. To them, everything is worthy of protection, embalming, restoration. Everything can have a second birth, the eternal birth of the simulacrum. Not only are the Americans missionaries, they are also Anabaptists: having missed out on the original baptism, they dream of baptizing everything a second time, and only accord value to this later sacrament which is, as we know, a repeat performance of the first, but its repetition as something more real. And this indeed is the perfect definition of the simulacrum.

All Anabaptists are sectarian, and sometimes violent. Americans are no exception to this rule. To reconstruct things in their exact form, so as to present them on the Day of Judgment, they are prepared to destroy and exterminate--Thomas Munzer was an Anabaptist.

It is not by chance that it is the Mormons who run the world's biggest computerization project: the recording of twenty generations of living souls throughout the world, a process which is seen as a rebaptizing of those souls, bringing them a new promise of salvation. Evangelization has become a mission of mutants, of extraterrestrials, and if it has progressed (?) in that direction, it is thanks to the latest memory-storage techniques.

And these have been made possible by the deep puritanism of computer science, an intensely Calvinistic, Presbyterian discipline, which has inherited the universal and scientific rigidity of the techniques for acheiving salvation by good works. The Counter-Reformation methods of the Catholic Church, with its naive sacramental practices, its cults, its more archaic and popular beliefs, could never compete with this modernity.

Executive Terminal

Basic Extermination

Metastatic Consumption."

-Jean Baudrillard, America

Mary Worth & French Post-Modernism: 09/20/21

"The only question in this journey is: how far can we go in the extermination of meaning, how far can we go in the non-referential desert form without cracking up and, of course, still keep alive the esoteric charm of disappearance? A theoretical question here materialized in the objective conditions of a journey which is no longer a journey and therefore carries with it a fundamental rule: aim for the point of no return. This is the key. And the crucial moment is that brutal instant which reveals that the journey has no end, that there is no longer any reason for it to come to an end. Beyond a certain point, it is movement itself that changes.

[...]

This moment of vertigo is also the moment of potential collapse. Not so much from the tiredness generated by the distance and the heat, as from the irreversible advance into the desert of time.

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life."

-Jean Baudrillard, America

Mary Worth & French Post-Modernism: 09/13/21

 

"If the history of modern society is marked by the dissolution of differences, that clearly has something to do with the sacrificial crisis to which we have repeatedly referred. Indeed, the phrase 'modern world' seems almost like a synonym for 'sacrificial crisis.' It should be noted, however, that the modern world manages to retain its balance, precarious though it may be; and the methods it employs to do so, though extreme, are not so extreme as to destroy the fabric of society. [...] The wearing away of differences proceeds at a slow but steady pace, and the results are absorbed more or less gracefully by a community that is slowly but steadily coming to encompass the entire globe.

[...]

We can witness here the same process of disintegration that takes place in primitive societies during the sacrificial crisis, but in this case the process is gradual, kept more or less in rein, with no catastrophic outbursts of violence and no resolution of any kind taking place. The astonishing flexibility of the 'modern,' along with its extraordinary functionalism, is here on view. Equally visible are the ever-increasing tensions that beset modern times."

-René Girard, Violence and the Sacred

Mary Worth & French Post-Modernism: 09/04/21

 A new series at The Adventures of Captain Peabody:

"The rhythm of the action is faster and more abrupt; it is reflected in the tragic dialogue or stichomythia, that is, in the exchange of insults and accusations that corresponds to the exchange of blows between warriors locked in single combat.

[...]

Whether the violence is physical or verbal, an interval of time passes between each blow. And each blow is delivered in the hope that it will bring the duel or dialogue to an end, constitute the coup de grace or final word.

The recipient of the blow is thrown momentarily off balance and needs time to pull himself together, to prepare a suitable reply. During this interval his adversary may well believe that the decisive blow has indeed been struck. Victory--or rather, the act of violence that permits no response--thus oscillates between the combatants, without either managing to lay final claim to it.

Only an act of collective expulsion can bring this oscillation to a halt and cast violence outside the community."

-René Girard, Violence and the Sacred