Jean Baudrillard's The Conspiracy of Art.
I am enjoying this text especially as I both agree with and disagree with the author in several registers. His use of the texts of Jarry is interesting and admirable, but the overall scope of the work is negative, if forthrightly so. It's the sort of 'is it really negation' which turns the notion of aporia into an art itself, and I think this is the "real" art of Baudrillard in this text. Baudrillard is probably one of the finest 'sculptors' of hermeneutic aporia there is..(like I know. gawd whatever) Nowhere does he really explore philosophy as an art within the text, or tear down the walls between art, science, and literature although he does make forays into the nexus of post-structuralist ideas in a way which makes one think he perhaps self- contaminated himself abit further than he lets on. If one views the book itself as a meta-text, as philosophy as art, then the one punctum which isn't drowned in the fevered cross-hatchings of his aporia-opera is his notion of the destructiveness of banality. This is has been one of my deformed underthoughts for many years, and JB gives an excellent rendering of the subject.. I haven't had the time to give the book my full attention if such a thing exists, but I am planning to read it next to Virilio and Lotringer's The Accident of Art but I've barely even had a chance to scan it though. Lotringer does mention Baudrillard's book on the second page of The Accident. There is some discussion of the aesthetics of futurism with reference to terrorism which is certainly interesting, a theme which is also present in a similiar way with reference to theories of the event in Sanford Kwinter's work Architectures of Time which I had paired with Jonathan Crary's Suspension of Perception.. I wanted to follow up on the co-editors of in my humble opinion one of the best Zone books Zone 6 Incorporations. The native oppositions between the sets are telling and fascinating. Virilio and Baudrillard roughly are deconstructing 'art' while Kwinter and Crary exploit the archive to make careful readings of perception and social evolution through the lens of the arts.. Of the two, Kwinter's is the text more weighted toward the literary with its explications of immanence in the work of Kafka and within the structures of unbuilt furturist buildings, there's also a good deal of Bergsonism.. The Crary is much closer to the work of Barbara Maria Stafford with its deep perusal of medical and popular culture materials.. There is also something of an agreement between the sets, in that explicitly the Virilio and Baudrillard treat Modernism (especially early) and its precursors as something of a swan-song to authenticity while the Crary and Kwinter do so implicitly in the selection of their subject matter. I find the contrasts and oppositions between these sets of texts to be especially fruitful in thinking about my own hairbrained view of things and also some small comfort in their radicalized outsider/insider viewpoints.. There is still a good deal of the old Cynics or Kynics in the sense of Slojterdijk, camp left and it is heartening. Both the Baudrillard and the Virilio perform something of a Diogenesian urinary critique on art's toga with the difference that art itself these days loves to drink piss, though I'm sure neither of them live in a tub or expect to find an honest man.. though it is probably mostly whores who pay their way.. after all what idea isn't prostituted anymore.. the world mind is a brothel and the sex is as cold and precise as a freshly lubed robot, automatic.. I guess the thing I really take away from these texts is a marvelous sense of subjectivity and a lens into another way of seeing.. which is curiously resonant with a section in Charles Stross' weirdo cyber-darwinian creative commons freak-opera Accelerando where sentient alien parasitical corporations barter in consciousness uploads, basically using captured digitized minds as money to sample and taste their subjectivies, their alieness, and all of this within an ancient transgalactic router whose owners deleted themselves to free themselves from their own Artificially intelligent spam.
