Page 182 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

170 LAWRENCE GROSSBERG

does not mean that it does not offer important insights into the changing
ways in which the real is effective in the social formation and its
organization of power. To the extent that Baudrillard’s theory denies its
own limits, it conflates the social formation with a particular set of effects,
with the plane of simulation, rendering all of social reality the simple
product of media causality. And in the end, that is no different than those
who would reduce reality or desire or power to meaning. Contradicting
itself, the position conflates ideology (in the form of the alibi or law of
value) with the multiple and complex sites of power, enabling him to
assume that only a refusal of any difference constitutes struggle. It
conflates the multiple and fragmentary social positionings of the masses
with a single configuration of or on the surface of the social body. The
great burden of these reductions is placed upon the concept of implosion,
as both indifference (in the masses who amusedly and in fascination live
the media hype) and deterrence (as a control sysem), as both an ecstatic
possibility and a catastrophic inevitability. But all of this says merely that
Baudrillard, for all of the postmodern speed of his writing practice, fails to
adequately theorize the sites of our postmodernity; he ends up being one of
its most enjoyable (if horrifying, or perhaps, because horrifying) texts
rather than its most reliable analyst.
The specificity of the contemporary social formation is more
complex than simple descriptions of the simulacrum or late capitalism
(commodification, bureaucratization, infotech, etc.) would suggest,
although these are real events with real effects. Thus, the problem is not
with the postmodernists’ descriptions as such but with the rather grandiose
status they assign to their descriptions. The questions of postmodernity as a
historical reality, whether experiential or tendential, have to be theorized
within the context of the theory of articulation and wild realism, that is,
within the spaces between cultural studies and postmodernism. This has two
important consequences. First, from the perspective of cultural studies, it
locates the critique of postmodernism in the project of inflecting such
descriptions into a less global and more consistent context of theorizing.
For example, we can re-read Baudrillard’s theory as a contribution to the
analysis of the changing politics of representation in history. Baudrillard
has described three planes of discursive effects which not only compete
with and displace one another but which may be simultaneously operative
and historically organized in any particular formation. Thus, rather than
making a global and ontological argument, Baudrillard’s theory of the
simulacrum marks the local articulations (and power relations) among
three planes of discursive effectivity: representation, mediation and
modelling.
Second, from the perspective of postmodernism, it locates the critique of
cultural studies in the project of detailing the determining displacements,
gaps and in some cases, even ruptures that have become constitutive of our