PostModern Blues
13/09/03 18:57 Filed by Saswat Pattanayak in:
Reference
My resistance to post-modernists is huge. Partly
because I think they make the dissident movements
effete by their convenient generalizations. Partly
also because I don’t see the vagueness as clearly as
they do. Either of us has to be less intelligent to
perceive the halos. Let me be the one, then.
In the meantime, I found Stuart Hall in his “On
postmodernism and articulation: An interview with
Sturat Hall”, (ed. Lawrence Grossberg) say this about
Baudrillard. How very accurate. Did I tell you how
much I love this man, Hall, who refuses to be a mere
legend.
“Let's take Baudrillard's argument about
representation and the implosion of meaning.This
seems to rest upon an assumption of the sheer
facticity of things: things are just what is seen
on the surface. They don't mean or signify
anything. They cannot be 'read'. We are beyond
reading, language. meaning. . . . I think
Baudrillard's position has become a kind of
super-realism, taken to the nth degree. It says
that, in the process of recognizing the real, there
is nothing except what is immediately there on the
surface. ... But there is all the difference in the
world between the assertion that there is no one
final, absolute meaning - no ultimate signified,
only the endlessly sliding chain of signofication,
and, on the other hand, the assertion that meaning
does not exist. ... Therefore, I don't agree with
Baudrillard that representation is at an end
because the cultural codes have become pluralized.
I think we are in a period of the infinite
multiplicity of codings, which is different. We
have all become, historically, fantastically
codable encoding agents. We are in the middle of
this multiplicity of readings and discourses and
that has produced new forms of self-consciousness
and reflexivity.”
(from Journal of Communication Inquiry (1986),
10(2), 45-60)
Tags: Saswat, Philosophy, Media, Communism