We have been emailing a lot recently, stemming from your building my website, because you were always the skilled one in the household, I the creative blob. Anyway, I have a number of other collaborative blogs, some more successful than others. And I thought we have rich conversations and lots in common. For instance, we have a similar hair although yours is a little thinner, similar faces though mine is a little more like a melon, with fatter cheeks, similar thought patterns though you have achieved a level of pragmatism I, well, haven't. We are also mother and daughter which creates a considerable common ground. Interestingly and obviously, you are of a different generation and you live nearly at the antipode of my current country of residence (actually, you'd have to plop yourself in the sea south-east of New Zealand to actually occupy my antipodal point geographically). If I am loftily musing on 'temporal' as well as 'linguistic' translation in my dissertation - translation of ideas between generations, as well as between cultures - then I think a collaborative blog between us, each from different generations, with different senses of history and in different countries, is a pragmatic and close-to-heart way to explore what do and do not understand in each others' experience with reference to the ideas of others and our own ideas. Also, anything, however trivial, can be on the topic of discussion.
Thinking about your email regarding Baudrillard's simulacra, I just read on this hip version of a philosophy for dummies website, Jacques Ranciere's disregard for these kinds of ideas:
"And then there’s Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard, who started his career by telling everybody to “Forget Foucault” is an academic troll par excellence. The theorists of simulation has taken Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and turned it into a nihilistic portrait of doom and despair. But Ranciere ain’t got time for that. Writing in “The Misadventures of Critical Thought” he says “theorists of simulation” (a not-so-subtle reference to Baudrillard) are at the heart of simulation itself.
It's not difficult for me to pinpoint what Ranciere means by "a form of nihilist knowledge of the reign of the commodity and the spectacle, of the equivalence of anything with anything and of anything with its image ", because this in itself has come to pass as critique in art school. Being the commodity in order to somehow (know one knows how) critique it.The Marxism of the denunciation of the mythologies of the commodity, the fallacies of consumer’s society and the empire of the spectacle. Forty years ago, it was supposed to unmask the machineries of domination, in order to provide the anti-capitalist fighters with new weapons. It has turned to exactly the contrary: a form of nihilist knowledge of the reign of the commodity and the spectacle, of the equivalence of anything with anything and of anything with its image…The current disconnection between the critical procedures and any perspective of emancipation only reveals the disjunction at the heart of the critical paradigm. It may make fun of its illusions but it remains enclosed in its logic. This is why I think it is necessary to re-examine the genealogy of the concepts and procedures of that logic and the way in which it got intertwined with the logic of social emancipation.
Yay - a collaborative blog with my daughter. I love the idea of a cross-antipodean, inter-generational blog – for the idea but also the connection between us as mother and child. You being in the foment of London art school ideas and dissertations makes me feel a bit ‘rusty’ – I’ve never been a natural ‘intellectual’ but always thought you may be. BTW I never put ‘blob’ after creative in thinking of you (not true!!), but I suppose I happily took a pragmatic role (mums have to really) and consciously supported any conditions for your artistic and intellectual growth. That said, I was very impressed by your general domestic and social competence when I visited London and you visited us here – like ‘where’dyagetthatfrom?’.
ReplyDeleteDoing your website took me back to my own uni experiences when we were immersed in semiotics and reading theorists like Roland Barthes, Baudrillard, Althusser etc. Remembering at that time, those ideas were critiquing a culture in which ‘high art’ was a given, for example. We’d all come out of school where there was given knowledge that this artist or that writer was great. Uni opened our eyes to notions of subjectivity and objectivity, gender, and constructed ‘reality’ and history. . I thought the spectator was emancipated back then – eg there was a whole school of thought around language and how it concealed authority by taking out the “I” and using the passive. So having experienced ‘death of the author’ as a uni student in the early 80s, it shocks me somewhat that this is still a subject of discussion, that art ‘presuppose an unbroken line between representation, knowledge, comprehension and political action’. (http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/reviews/2010/188). But the notion of the gormless, duped consumer waiting to have their eyes is prevalent and I am guilty of thinking that way. So maybe I will follow this up (twill not be immediate as I need to digest it a bit):
I think it is necessary to re-examine the genealogy of the concepts and procedures of that logic and the way in which it got intertwined with the logic of social emancipation.