Baudrilltard
JEAN BAUDRILLARD - THE PYRES OF AUTUMN:
Great. Another learned essay from M. Baudrillard. Or perhaps, it isn't and he is not really learned. After all, "learnedness" is only sustained by the desire of rest of the world to possess it. I certainly don't, if Baudrillard's intellectual power consists of his power to assert things without supplying reasons why others should believe him.
The west is not a seductive woman whose power lies in her ability to reject others. I happen to enjoy life here without the need to feel superior; then again, maybe me saying that proves somehow that I'm lying. Or perhaps the very structure of this blog contains the seeds of its own implosion... It's hard to argue against someone who says stuff like this.
"The superiority of Western culture is sustained only by the desire of the rest of the world to join it. When there is the least sign of refusal, the slightest ebbing of that desire, the West loses its seductive appeal in its own eyes. Today it is precisely the ‘best’ it has to offer—cars, schools, shopping centres—that are torched and ransacked. Even nursery schools: the very tools through which the car-burners were to be integrated and mothered. ‘Screw your mother’ might be their organizing slogan. And the more there are attempts to ‘mother’ them, the more they will. Of course, nothing will prevent our enlightened politicians and intellectuals from considering the autumn riots as minor incidents on the road to a democratic reconciliation of all cultures. Everything indicates that on the contrary, they are successive phases of a revolt whose end is not in sight"
Great. Another learned essay from M. Baudrillard. Or perhaps, it isn't and he is not really learned. After all, "learnedness" is only sustained by the desire of rest of the world to possess it. I certainly don't, if Baudrillard's intellectual power consists of his power to assert things without supplying reasons why others should believe him.
The west is not a seductive woman whose power lies in her ability to reject others. I happen to enjoy life here without the need to feel superior; then again, maybe me saying that proves somehow that I'm lying. Or perhaps the very structure of this blog contains the seeds of its own implosion... It's hard to argue against someone who says stuff like this.
posted by Austin 5-000 at 2:14 AM
7 Comments:
This is hardly a researched academic paper, but then again it's not paper length. It's more like an op-ed, and a rather conventionally argued one, taking many things for granted and asserting a position without supplying mountains of evidence. These happen every day on the NY Times op-ed page, and we can read them and enjoy their contribution.
Elsewhere, Baud says:
"It is French—more broadly, European—society which, by its very process of socialization, day by day secretes the relentless discrimination of which immigrants are the designated victims, though not the only ones. This is the change on the unequal bargain of ‘democracy’. This society faces a far harder test than any external threat: that of its own absence, its loss of reality. Soon it will be defined solely by the foreign bodies that haunt its periphery: those it has expelled, but who are now ejecting it from itself."
(Sorry for the lengthy quote.) This seems to me to be a very real problem in Europe. Many societies are experiencing the quandary of expanding their democratic rights to foreigners while at the same time fearing the loss of a national identity. Germany, with its Turkish minority, is similar. And Baudrillard is also right to note that Europe, which has been reclining on its ideological haunches for the last half-century, is ill prepared to face an ideologically fired up "other" (I won't say enemy, because I want to see the two sides reconciled in a liberal framework, with substantial changes on both sides).
Baudrillard's problem is that he not only thinks Europe has become complacent and weak, but that its system is hypocritical and obsolescent. He also rather unfairly thinks that foreigners (and I can only think he means Muslims) will always categorically reject Western materialism and "decadence." In this way he is much like his fellow postmodern, anti-liberal naysayer Stanley Fish. Neither seems interested in harvesting the kernel of rational debate and understanding that is always the potential greatness of Western Enlightenment values, whatever its defects. This is disturbing to me, because they seem to think there is no difference between the symbolic "violence" that occurs in compromise and working things out peacefully, wherein both sides are forced to give and take a little, and the very real violence that we see in France and the Danish embassies (and, I would say to Western warmongers, in Iraq).
"It's more like an op-ed, and a rather conventionally argued one, taking many things for granted and asserting a position without supplying mountains of evidence. These happen every day on the NY Times op-ed page, and we can read them and enjoy their contribution".
A conventional column either cites facts, or assumes truths that are accepted as conventional. It is not conventional to assume that European culture is "absent". For a typical column, see: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/13/AR2006021301569.html?sub=AR
Whether or not I agree with Baudrillard or Zakaria (I happen not be too worried about the whole "fate of Europe" issue), Zakaria does something that Baudrillard does not: cite facts. Sure, you have the spiel about the number of cars burned at the beginning, but that's just the typical "quote on fact at the beginning and improvise" bullshit for which Friedman, Coulter, and Malkin are justly criticized.
As for the question of whether Europe is ready for an ideological war with its immigrants, I see this question as biased from the beginning. Why do we let people assume there is going to be an ideological war? There is no evidence that the European Muslim community is as fired up as people might want you to believe.
"I am not so sure that the rioters want to be reintegrated on these lines. Perhaps they consider the French way of life with the same condescension or indifference with which it views theirs. Perhaps they prefer to see cars burning than to dream of one day driving them. Perhaps their reaction to an over-calculated solicitude would instinctively be the same as to exclusion and repression". Why "Perhaps"? Because he can't prove this, has no evidence for it, etc. Whether or not it is a column or a journal article, you still must justify your claims. The fact that people burned schools does not mean that they despise them--it means they are too stupid to understand what they are doing to their community. No one would ever say that the LA riots of the early 90's implied that african americans somehow despised the property they damaged. And the LA riots yielded "more than 50 killed, over 4 thousand injured, 12,000 people arrested, and $1 billion in property damage". Compare to the French riots : €200 Million damage, (maybe) one person dead, 126 Police and Firefighters wounded (can't find other injured).
What's different here is the assumption that Baudrillard knows what these people are thinking when they burn buildings. Perhaps some of them would say he does. But the evidence seems to show that these kids were just letting off their aggression.
"Both radical Muslim organizations, such as the Tabligh, an international proselytizing group active in France, and more moderate ones, like the Union of French Islamic Organizations (UOIF), which issued a fatwa v condemning the riots as un-Islamic, have revealed their powerlessness and total lack of impact on the situation. Teenagers from the cités are having an exhilarating time and are not going to stop because of an order of an imam or an Islamist recruiter who wants them to lead a boring, pious life. The only real Islamist danger would be to send them to prison where they could encounter religious radicalism"
From a well written column at the Brookings institute.
http://www.brookings.edu/views/articles/fellows/laurence_vaisse_20051201.htm
Nobody is saying that they don't want material prosperity, except for Baudrillard. He can't just pull this out of thin air because it matches the argument he made about 9/11. I can't appreciate this contribution.
The irony of this situation is that a few months ago I was (rightly) chided for not taking Victor Davis Hansen seriously enough, even though his "Letter to Europe" column similarly contained no hard evidence and was full of vacuous platitudes and cantankerous conservative orthodoxy. Remember these words?
"It seems like you are missing some of what he is actually saying because you want to portray him as a right wing ideologue. That's fine if this is DailyKOS or Atrios, but if we are to provide a "ruthless interrogation of narratives" it is improper. If you want to disagree with conservatism (actually, liberalism in this case) then you need to interrogate it correctly."
Just replace "right-wing ideologue" with "postmodernist" and "conservatism" with "radicalism" and you have the same argument staring back at you.
I forgot when it became a crime to simply provoke thought. Is it all about forcing immediate conviction that stems axiomatically from the facts? Does that even happen? I think that some of the best works are those which ask questions and posit "perhaps"'s, for they are the pieces that let me think the most on my own. I doubt Baudrillard is writing from a completely factless position, but I dont think that's what he's trying to write.
Wrong wrong wrong, Scantron. If you look at my post about VDH, it is all about supplying the facts that he refers to but that you allege are nonconsequential. Remember when you said "Look, if you were searching for potential enemies, you could have the tact to stop at Russia before insinuating that starving Africans pose a threat to the United States"?
I replied by showing that terrorism was indeed a problem in Africa, that over 200 people had been killed in attacks on our embassies in Africa and by citing this fact: "Twelve of the 22 individuals on the FBI's 'Most Wanted Terrorist' list released by the White House on Wednesday are from African nations".
All of that was because you thought that the words "in addition to the famine and savagery in Africa" were ridiculous--because you didn't know what had happened there. Africa is a threat. This further proves my point. The facts that Hansen alludes to are in that article are generally well-accepted. I didn't need to agree with Hansen to point out that your characterization of him ignored the facts.
The difference is that Baudrillard has neither facts nor arguable points in his article. See the "perhaps" part of his argument. There is no sign that these people are ascetics; to the contrary,
"I doubt Baudrillard is writing from a completely factless position"
Well, think about it. I just alleged that he is. No one has responded to the facts I cited about the riots. I suspect that it is because his position not only lacks facts, but is counterfactual.
"Is it all about forcing immediate conviction that stems axiomatically from the facts? Does that even happen?"
I'm sorry, I just can't answer this. If you prefer hypotheticals and abstract thought, that's fine. But I'm not going to pretend that this article has any merit in terms of facts. It just doesn't. What are we supposed to do with arguments that aren't "tied down" to the facts? Just look at them and say they're nice? Great. Lots of fun, really useful, makes us all better people, express your feelings, just think about things for a while, cool.
My main problem with Baudrillard is the mystical talk of values and symbolic collapse of "the west" etc. What is he doing, exactly? What mechanism forces the West to implode? His analysis? "Marxism"?
Certainly not the last. Marxism ostensibly has something to do with Marx, a man who spent years writing about economics, doing things, not just ruminating and making vague noises. The German Ideology is a polemic against the very bullshit that Baudrillard perpetrates on the world. Marx made testable claims. That’s the very thing Baudrillard refuses to do. Oooh, how fun!
I predicted that the word "nonconsequential" would be an entry at dictionary.com. It wasn't. Yet, in a symbolic way, it is, because I thought that it would be.
This is the last thing I am going to say on this issue, it's taking up too much time:
Baudrillard's opinions are counterfactual. This originates because of his mode of expression: applying his worldview onto the world, as opposed to trying to understand the world based on empirics.
I expect the reply: Well Nietzsche, your favorite philosopher, didn't do that! Why can't my buddy Baud write like Nietzsche did?
Some partsof Nietzsche's work employ this kind of argument. His talk about the fate of europe is similar to Baudrillards own. I prefer Nietzsche's work on this subject to Baudrillard's because it's just better. BUT: Even though I admire Nietzsche, I do not accept his arguments that I find to be counterfactual. The same standard should be applied to Baudrillard. The evidence is that the much ballyhooed violence of the banlieues was caused by pissed off unemployed kids who happen to be mostly Muslim Immigrants. Their rage was inspired by the injustice they felt was being perpetrated against them, but much of the activity was simply glee-filled destruction that is well-known to anybody who grew up in America. These kids are not ascetic Muslim warriors; they wear american basketball jersies and listen to rap music.
To conclude:
Baudrillard's argument is wrong because it contradicts the facts. If facts were not available on the subjects that he was writing about, or if they were open to dispute, then it would be a different story. He could write his thoughts down and we could all read them with joy. But he is wrong, according to any interpretation of the facts at hand. I therefore dissaprove of his method because it is a counterfactual assertion of his worldview onto a real world situation. It is more similar to a Christian/Platonic argument than anything else: my ideas are reality, not the reality that we see. I suspect that's why many atheistic liberals find him so attractive. He asserts that justice will be found in this world when the west gets its comeuppance for imperialism, reinforcing the Christian moral beliefs while replacing God with some sort of weird symbolic mechanism.
That's fine. It's like telling me I'm not really enjoying my life because I am not a christian. The West will keep chugging along, and Baudrillard can claim it is declining as much as he wants. But, obviously, he is incorrect. So, unless someone would like to argue that my grasp of the empirics of the issue is lacking, please don't complain. I'm not going to say that it's OK to write things down that are untrue.
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