Thursday, March 23, 2006

Influence

Fluid seeps in from all around. The influx of other peoples' conscious and unconscious thoughts and theories are what make up one layer of my intellect. I accept that. I reject that. Somewhere in between I find that "original" is not a word one can use.

I was innocently working on my final term paper when I stumbled across mentions of Baudrillard. Now, in my four years at Emily Carr I have never read much of his writing. I've read reams of other stuff--Foucault, Nancy, Kristeva, Barthes etc. Perhaps all these ladies and gentlemen have filtered into me, little bits of Deleuze crop up now and then, scraps of old Stuart Hall from my sociology days. But when Baudrillard was presented to me in a book by Arthur Kroker (Poli-Sci Prof at Concordia) titled "The Possessed Individual: Technology and the French Postmodern" as a Lucretian (!) I felt a lot of things come together. Things also atomised at the same time. I think its a Lucretian thing.

Kroker from page 61.
"Not primitivism as a past long exterminated by the triumph of the rationalist totality, but as the actual destiny of the code: that is, the seduction of loss, excess and discharge, 'the necessity of lack,' as the inevitable, because so fascinating, point of imminent reversability of the law of value."

The aspirations of society up until recently have been to push the project as far as it could go. That the revolutions and technological innovations of the human "genius " have been only leading to a promised land of superiority without the realisation that the first people to use fire could have told us: you may get burned. They conquered theirfear by having to face it , but did not lose their respect for the volatility of elements.

After the French and Russian revolution it would seem that traits such as respect and dignity became equated with the absurdities of the aristocracies and therefore rejected in favour of a forthright rationalism that led to different sorts of debasements, other genocides. The point being on both sides of those histories basic laws of fate were excised. The will was believed capable of anything. Descartes will always have to answer dearly for pulling us out of our intuitions and making us believe that we could be in control all the time.

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