Page 215 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

WAITING ON THE END OF THE WORLD? 203

so long as there is alienation, there is spectacle, action, scene….
Obscenity begins precisely where there is no more spectacle, no more
scene, when all becomes transparent and immediate visibility, when
everything is exposed to the harsh and inexorable light of information
and communication. 2

The concentrated vehemence in these sort of pronouncements by
Baudrillard, who is often considered to be the totemic source of the
postmodern malaise, perhaps symptomatically reveals his vicinity to his
anguished accusers. Seeking to preserve the project of modernity, they
cannot forgive him for cynically betraying the faculty that permits him to
speak. By carrying to the extreme, where reason runs riot, the logic of
alienated consciousness, he has unavoidably exposed the Other, the
repressed, the unconscious, side of the occidental ratio in a parodic
rhapsody. 3
In a world that is seemingly running down, that every day is choked with
signs producing less and less sense, Baudrillard’s phlegmatic philosophy
offers a bleak dirge for the loss of meaning, for the withering away of
stable, semantic guarantees, the referents, that have been nullified in the
empty space between the signs. Baudrillard’s voice here becomes that of a
latter-day flâneur in a dying universe, casting the concentrated light of his
melancholic reason on the semiotic entropy of a world lost in space. This
does not represent a passive acceptance of the present so much as the
logical extension of a negative rationalism: an excess that spills over and
sabotages the limits of the previously ‘rational’. We can choose to read it as
the inadvertent acknowledgement that a certain critical ‘distance’,
authority and truth is being ineluctably swept away in the enveloping and
apparently indifferent movement of the modern world. This is what
Baudrillard himself likes to call the ‘historical collapse’ in which everything
becomes ecstatic and ex-centric, without referent or centre.
But the rhetorical flourish of the ‘collapse of the real’ is ultimately a deeply
ambiguous assertion. What is undoubtedly collapsing is an earlier
confidence in assigning an unequivocal sense of the ‘real’ conceived of in
terms of a rationalist paradigm that produces a complete and potentially
exhaustive sense of knowledge. Knowledge, and the realities it speaks for,
becomes altogether more complex. The rationalist plane is supplemented
by more complex epistemological figures and a series of ontological
openings that call for a radical revision of history, culture and politics. As
Edward Said insists, any rationalist codification—the ‘knowledge’ that
constitutes the field of ‘Orientalism’, for instance—is at the same time a
codification of the historical powers invested in the paradigm and in their
underlying relation to the ‘real’: Eurocentrism, imperialism and racism, for
4
example. Such a breach in ‘reality’ can therefore be fruitfully exposed and
explored in order to deviate and unpack the languages that previously