Ghost in the Wire

I'm back.

I don't know if someone has already claimed this one, but if not, I'm calling nomenclature rights. As such, I define Rufo's Law as follows:

When it comes to theoretical work of any type, the more widely "assumed" a certain argument, concept, or thinker is, the less that argument, concept, or thinker is actually understood.

Less Josh think I'm talking about his recent discussion of phonocentrism, I'm not really, or at least that wasn't the inspiration for this post. Sure, I do think that far too much of Derrida is now "assumed" and, concomitantly, rather horribly misunderstood. Derrida will remain one of the more complicated philosophers, rich in reward, for some time, and I suspect he will be read and re-interpreted long after others of his day have passed from the collective consciousness. I do not think we have even begun to read Derrida - but that is an issue for a different post.

Nothing Derrida-related prompted the declaration of Rufo's Law. No, the actual inspiration came from a series of comments about Baudrillard, scattered across the intertubes and a random aside in article I recently read. Baudrillard is one of those people who routinely suffer from what I call "drive-by parentheticals," wherein an article wants to assert some commonly "assumed" fact that Baudrillard might commonly be "assumed" to provide, and so randomly inserts Baudrillard into a footnote or parenthetical citation. In effect, we see comments like, "given the proliferation of simulacra (Baudrillard 1994), yada yada." That's the drive-by - academic style.

As someone who has read a lot of Baudrillard and who has sustained a keen interest in his work despite moments in which I withdraw, look elsewhere, or even recoil, I am still amazed at how little even self-proclaimed fans of his work actually understand him. For the vast majority of commentators, the Baudrillard they know is that of Simulations, or Simulacra and Simulations, or Seduction, or Silent Majorities. Sure, they saw a Cool Memories volume once or twice in a university bookstore, and some of them even stumbled upon The Transparency of Evil, almost by accident (the irony). And of course, they read the Internet version of Baudrillard's 9-11 essay. And most are aware that he and Foucault fought about something or other. But even these other encounters simply orbit the mainstays of what is assumed to be Baudrillard's standardized corpus, which, strangely enough, are the middle, transitional texts in his work. Ignored and unattended are the beautiful and essential earlier works on political economy and symbolic exchange, and "assumed" are the later works on evil, the end, and virtual reality. You can hear their inner voices as they flip quickly through the pages of a random JB text in Borders, or see the cover flash by on their "Amazon recommends" pages: "Been there, done that, it's all simulacra, baby. We've heard it all before. Now how about this shiny Badiou book instead?"

Unfortunately, Rufo's Law is here in full effect. And the assumed Baudrillard is, not surprisingly, the most often misunderstood and misappropriated Baudrillard. The irony, of course, is that this sort of academic game is precisely the sort of simulational theoretical enterprise that Baudrillard decried, and the one that prompted him to change his writing style after Symbolic Exchange and Death to one more allusional rather than referential, and more poetic than academic.

Baudrillard needs to be re-read and re-engaged, I think. He is too often folded into Deleuzian readings or "corrected" by Zizekian analysis, as if Baudrillard hadn't already laid out thorough, nuanced, and rather impressive criticisms of the internal heuristic limits of both the desiring machine and psychoanalysis. He is said to ignore class conditions and the necessity of Marxist critique, as well as the reality of suffering, even as he spends entire books detailing his objections to Marxism and essay after essay explaining the role of the reality-principle in the portrayal of suffering. He is declared a (bad) nihilist and a misogynist, as if he never accounted for and addressed criticism of his work after the 80s, and as if he never further extended and enriched his analysis. That this sort of short-thrift, simulation-via-assumption engagement has become so commonplace, and that it confirms much of his take-down of critical theory, should hardly be surprising. If anything, it seems banal, perhaps even oafish, to take note of it. Nevertheless...