Baudrillard’s Exoteric Magic
Posted by Tim Stevens on 4 June 2008
I’ve recently abandoned my pre-Ubiwar protoblogging persona, but was trawling through some old posts and found the following, duly edited for contemporary purposes:
An article by Michael Agger in Slate, Le Browser: saluting Jean Baudrillard, is an affectionate tribute to the deceased French provocateur. It includes this passage, quoted from America (1988):
Hence, the academic grappling with his computer, ceaselessly correcting, reworking, and complexifying, turning the exercise into a kind of interminable psychoanalysis, memorizing everything in an effort to escape the final outcome, to delay the day of reckoning with death, and that other - fatal - moment of reckoning that is writing, by forming an endless feed-back loop with machine.
Although not quoted in the article, the next sentence is:
This is a marvellous instrument of exoteric magic.
See, I find that funny. I’m sure people took Baudrillard too seriously. Too literally as well, if the incredible furore over his ‘the Gulf War did not take place’ thesis is any yardstick.
