Baudrillardian Bits

We reconvene tomorrow night, of course, for our penultimate meeting, and our viewing of Stephen Frears captivating 2003 film, Dirty Pretty Things. The film may most evidently connect with the contemporary London sections of The Satanic Verses, but I think you'll find that it is richly conversant with our conversations about issues of migrancy, the reach of the past, imaginary homelands, the "gatherings" of Bhabha, the rhetoric of the streets and pedestrianism, global citizenship and imagined communities, etc.

I hope your thoughts about your final papers are developing productively apace. I just had a couple more mini-insights/possible leads (as I imagine writing a similar paper -- and, indeed, I keep threatening myself that I'll try to write an article soon), which don't necessarily go anywhere yet but which may be suggestive nonetheless: during one of the characterizations of the cracked, banal state of "stock-owning Mall America," the narrator of Fury indicates that "among the young, the inheritors of plenty, the problem was most acute" (115). When, two pages later, we read that "such was the life of the young in the America of the incipient third millennium" (117), I perked up and thought, "Oh, that's almost the Midnight's Children idea in a new setting, context: i.e., the one novel is about the children of independence in India, and the other is about the children of the third millennium. Both combine propitiousness and peril. One sees clearly in a simple example like this how Rushdie's mind and thoughts have traveled across two decades as a novelist. As we move into tomorrow night's film and continue to think about notions of global citizenship (and the corresponding ethical orientation that accompanies the new forms of citizenship and (un)belonging), I also remain intrigued by how Rushdie has moved (in The Moor's Last Sigh and Fury) to a more critical stance vis-a-vis hybridity. I'm still thinking about that 2-3 page description of the Spanish town of Benegeli in TMLS, and specifically about the hollowness of the town's multiculturalism/hybridity; it seems to anticipate the discourse of the simulacrum in Fury in that it's a kind of fake/simulated hybridity. There's no serious, community-building essence to the diversity on the Street of Parasites. It reminds me a little bit of Malik's disgust and astonishment as he is forced to listen to pedestrians conduct intimate conversations on their cell phones for all the world to hear.

Which brings me to Baudrillard and the title of this posting. Many of you have probably read excerpts from his provocative little book Simulations (I passed out a handout in class last time about Disneyworld: his argument there is that having places like Disneyworld leads us (falsely) to believe that there are imaginary/simulated spaces (e.g., Disneyworld) and "real" spaces (e.g., the world outside of Disneyworld), when in fact even that so-called "real" world is now hopelessly gone amidst the barrage of images, signs, media blitzes, etc.). Baudrillard elsewhere proposes (in a passage I read to you last week,and, again, think of Fury in this context) that "today it is quotidian reality in its entirety--political, social, historical, and economic--that from now incorporates the simulatory dimension of hyperrealism" and that, consequently, "art is everywhere, since artifice is at the very heart of reality. And so art is dead, not only because its critical transcendence is gone, but because reality itself, entirely impregnated by an aesthetic which is inseparable from its own structure, has been confused with its own image." Maybe these ideas help us to perceive and assess the accomplishment of a novel like Fury (especially combined with how presciently the novel diagnoses the Baudrillardian/postmodern condition and connects this condition with what will happen on 9/11).

I'll reproduce it here (since I can't recall if maybe it was covered by the screen after I wrote it on the whiteboard last week), but the following is a useful way of contextualizing/mapping all of this. According to Baudrillard, there are four basic historic phases of the sign (recall from your past encounters with theory and structural linguistics that a sign is composed of any signifier and signified): (1) There is a truth, a basic reality that is faithfully represented (by a sign, by language, etc.); (2) This truth/reality still exists, but it is distorted, warped, or perverted through representation; (3) This truth/reality has gone, though we still try to cling to it by masking its disappearance through representation; (4) There is no relationship between the sign and reality, because there is no longer anything to to reflect. Western society, according to Baudrillard, has now entered this 4th stage and is unambiguously in the age of simulation. Fury might then be asking if there can be any degree of recovery. And does/can this help us work through some of the vexing questions about gender and sexuality with which we struggled last week? That is, via Baudrillard's logic, normal sexual desire is no longer a personal response to a person we meet and engage: instead, it's created and stimulated by images of beauty and desire with which the media bombards us.