kagablog

9 Responses to “apropos”

1. O~* Says:
   July 14th, 2008 at 6:37 pm

   we *had* baudrillard.

   today his words make such obvious sense to anyone with a facebook account. a decade ago when i read him at varsity it was all geek to me.

2. ABRAXAS Says:
   July 14th, 2008 at 6:43 pm

   you are so right about the necessary gestation period. for me reading those semiotexte paperbacks back in the early eighties was incredibly startling and meaningful, but i never understood why. now we are living that ‘why’.

3. O~* Says:
   July 14th, 2008 at 6:55 pm

   yeah, i know what you mean… i felt that immensity too, and was desperately trying to digest what i was reading. i could just barely make out a shadow of a trajectory in my daily life, but my imagination hurt! after all, we still had to stand in hour long queues to be able to use the five computers connected to the internet in the UND LAN, at 28 kilobits per second… virtually no multimedia functionality.

   so. anyone here reading anything incomprehensible at varsity right now??

4. helge Says:
   July 15th, 2008 at 11:42 am

   baudrillard: the literary version of soduku. it grabs your attention and once understood can be discarded with as equal disinterest as a completed soduku puzzle. it has no meaning outside of itself. a wonderful game for intellectuals to play with each other (or themselves) because it demands absolutely nothing from them. understanding and comprehending the game changes nothing.

   sorry, but nietzche is in a different class.

5. O~* Says:
   July 15th, 2008 at 3:09 pm

   what do you mean “has no meaning outside of itself”?

   baudrillard described, with pretty astonishing prescience, the state of affairs we sit with now. his style of writing is *descriptive* rather than normative/prescriptive. This is where it differs from Nietzsche’s. both writers’ works have “meaning outside of themselves.” however the nature of that meaning is different, and so it is not really useful to compare the two writers’ content, in my opinion.

   nietzsche’s writing is full of moral exhortations to the reader; it prescribes the way that people should behave in the state of affairs he outlines. baudrillard’s does not presume to do this. to me, that does not make it any less pertinent.

   you say that “understanding and comprehending the game changes nothing”. not so. understanding and comprehending society’s ‘game’ allows one the freedom to choose how one interacts in relation to that game, rather than being blindly manipulated. yes, once understood, once the pieces have fallen into place through the exposition of a writer like baudrillard, the puzzle and the descriptive text thereof can be discarded, but surely this is a good thing? one is forever free from seduction by that fabrication… it will no longer waste any of one’s energy.

6. O~* Says:
   July 15th, 2008 at 3:33 pm

   i think your contempt for baudrillard might also stem from a belief that it is an intellectual’s responsibility to speak out against that which is abhorrent to them about society?

   i don’t believe in politics with a capital p. i used to, but i no longer do. politics allow us to make excuses that absolve us from personal responsibility. i don’t believe in a prescriptive blanket morality either. i guess i subscribe to a smaller scale of moral politics, one of personal responsibility. sure, i want the things i hate about society to change. but i believe i can only influence this process effectively in my own limited sphere of influence, by living the changes i wish to see, by contributing positively to society. i want work to build something OTHER than that which disgusts and disturbs me, rather than spending my energy constantly denouncing the awful things that exist, which is negative work. opposition often only strengthens the sway of the idea opposed by giving it more coverage.

7. O~* Says:
   July 15th, 2008 at 3:55 pm

   sorry to make a third comment in a row… but, to tie what i said in both comments together, it comes down to the issue of engagement. i think what helge was criticising was those who “intellectualise” for the sake of it, without engagement to change things. i don’t think baudrillard is guilty of that accusation: his contribution is to providing the clarity necessary for understanding that with which ‘intellectuals’ (helge, you are one too, you know, by virtue of the fact that you think about these things!) must engage. and i think my second post was in anticipated defence of being criticised as guilty of that myself.

   i think that there are many ways of engaging with issues in the world, and that an oppositional moral stance is but one of those.

8. Gargoyle Says:
   July 17th, 2008 at 9:40 pm

   Of The Thing In The Garden; And Of The Way Of The Tao
   (Aleister Crowley “Moonchild”)

   “Let me explain!” said Simple Simon. “If everybody did his Will, there would be no collision. Every man and every woman is a star. It is when we get off our orbits that the clashes come. Now if a Thing gets off its orbit, and comes into my sphere of attraction, I absorb it as quietly as possible, and the stars sing together again.”

   “Whew!” said Cyril, and pretended to wipe the sweat from his brow.

   “But weren’t you in danger from that devilish Thing?” asked Lisa, with the memory of a great anxiety. She had trembled like an aspen during the scene in the garden.

   “The rhinoceros,” quoted Simon Iff, “finds no place in him into which to thrust its horn, nor the tiger a place in which to fix its claws, nor the weapon a place to admit its point. And for what reason? Because there is in him no place of death.”

   “But you did nothing. You were just acting like an ordinary man. But I think it would have been death for any one but you.”

   “An ordinary man would not have touched the Thing. It was on a different plane, and would no more have interfered with him than sound interferes with light. A young magician, one who had opened a gate on to that plane, but had not yet become master of that plane, might have been overcome. The Thing might even have dispossessed his ego, and used his body as its own. That is the beginner’s danger in magick.”

   “And what is your secret?”

   “To have assimilated all things so perfectly that there is no longer any possibility of struggle. To have destroyed the idea of duality. To have achieved Love and Will so that there is no longer any object to Love, or any aim for Will. To have killed desire at the root; to be one with every thing and with Nothing.

   “Look!” he went on, with a change of tone, “why does a man die when he is struck by lightning? Because he has a gate open to lightning; he insists on being an electrical substance by possessing the quality of resistance to the passage of the electric current. If we could diminish that resistance to zero, lightning would no longer take notice of him.

   “There are two ways of preventing a rise of temperature from the sun’s heat. One is to oppose a shield of non-conducting and opaque material: that is Cyril’s way, and at the best it is imperfect; some heat always gets through. The other is to remove every particle of matter from the space which you wish to be cold; then there is nothing there to become hot; and that is the Way of the Tao.”

9. M Raubenheimer Says:
   July 18th, 2008 at 12:36 am

   dark est glint

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