Page 195 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

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transposed to the broad field of ‘communications’ where they function as
metaphors (principally, perhaps, they work—as such transpositions of
scientific terms worked within modernism, for instance in futurism and
cubism—as metaphors of modernity itself, as signs of the New). The
antiteleological tendency is potentially there in the Saussurian insistence on
the arbitrary nature of the sign. It ‘comes out’ explicitly in the post-
structuralist elevation of the signifier/withering away of the signified and is
most pronounced in Baudrillard’s order of the simulacra where in a
parodic inversion of historical materialism the model precedes and
generates the real-seeming (which in the age of miniaturized
communications is all that’s left of the ‘real’), where use value is completely
absorbed into exchange value (in the form of sign-exchange value), where
the old base-superstructure analogy is turned upside-down so that value is
seen to be generated in the production and exchange of insubstantials
(information, image, ‘communications’, in speculation on, for example, the
currency and commodity future markets) rather than from the
expropriation of ‘surplus value’ through the direct exploitation of an
industrial proletariat employed to produce three dimensional goods in
factories. (At this point Baudrillard’s characterization of a world given over
to the production of irreal or ‘hyperreal’ simulacra derives a specious quasi-
empirical grounding from the work of those ‘post-industrialists’ (Alain
Touraine, Daniel Bell, Andre Gorsz, Alvin Toffler) who concentrate on the
impact in the overdeveloped world of the new communications
technologies on labour power, the relations between and compositon of the
classes, industrial patterns of work, consumption, culture, models of
subjectivity, and so on.)
The rhetorical tropes which form the literary-artistic-critical means for
effacing the traces of teleology are parody, simulation, pastiche and
allegory (Newman, 1986). All these tropes tend to deny the primacy or
originary power of the ‘author’ as sole source of meaning, remove the
injunction placed upon the (romantic) artist to create substance out of
nothing (that is, to ‘invent’, be ‘original’) and confine the critic/artist
instead to an endless ‘reworking of the antecedent’ in such a way that the
purity of the text gives way to the promiscuity of the inter-text and the
distinction between originals and copies, hosts and parasites, ‘creative’
texts and ‘critical’ ones is eroded (with the development of meta-fiction and
paracriticism). In parody, pastiche, allegory and simulation what tends to
get celebrated is the accretion of texts and meanings, the proliferation of
sources and readings rather than the isolation, and deconstruction of the
single text or utterance. None of these favoured tropes (parody, etc.) offer
the artist a way of speaking from an ‘authentic’ (that is [after Barthes,
Derrida and Foucault] imaginary) point of pure presence (romanticism).
Nor do they offer the critic a way of uncovering the ‘real’ (intended)
meaning or meanings buried in a text or a ‘phenomenon’ (hermeneutics).