cc- Baudrillard i.e the death of your feeble hopes

So they say “punk is dead,” and I’ve never had a problem agreeing with “them” on this issue.

For some reason I have been getting a lot of really awful magazines in the mail (Glamour, Star, Entertainment Weekly, GQ, some stupid car magazine). Usually I just throw them away so that I don’t get a brain aneurism trying to make sense of where the actual articles are located, since these magazines are usually over 90% ads. But the other day my boyfriend actually kept GQ because there was an article called “Mind Your Bollocks! 30 Years of Punk.” I don’t think he took it seriously, but as a publisher of his own magazine these things perk his curiosity. I ranted and raved about how the article would just piss him off, and it did, but he looked anyway. Sure enough, the table of contents (which was on like page 40 and took us forever to find) listed the article with this caption, “GQ’s fast, loud, and occasionally filthy guide to all things punk.” Occasionally filthy?! Oh how daringly “punk” of GQ magazine. After that, I gave up. I didn’t even want to know what kind of categorized, sanitized, watered down sort of “punk” I was going to get from this article. I think punk died the second someone called it punk. And it seems Jean Baudrillard would agree. How can anarchy and rebellion ever be packaged and sold? Obviously, it can and it has, but its just a simulacra. If someone is “punk” they should be living under a bridge, not wearing $70 tight jeans and going on MTV with a few tattoos and a “bad attitude,” and posing this as punk because they play songs with the same three cord changes. It’s dead. It is a total simulacrum of what the original was, “a copy of an imitation.”

Well, this is all too obvious and has been since probably the 80’s. But what isn’t so apparent is Baudrillard’s notion that not just punk, but a lot of other things are also these hyper realities, and by “a lot of things” I mean everything. Ouch. This one hurts my brain meats in a big way (even though I love it).

Baudrillard is a great deal more readable than some of the other theorists we’ve encountered this semester, and perhaps that is because his themes are more familiar to me (I studied him last year and I saw the Matrix). Yet, even though I get almost everything he is saying, I don’t get it. Because I read something like “truth, reference, [and] objective cause have ceased to exist” (455) and it isn’t too difficult to interpret, it even sounds right, but then it sort of melts away in my brain and leaves me with nothing but questions.

If everything is a giant simulacrum and nothing is real, nothing is true, then why does Baudrillard even write? To say that nothing is true except for the fact that nothing is true, means that SOMETHING is true… nothing. Oh man, headaches again. How can Baudrillard assert that it is an “impossibility” to have “a determined discursive position” (464) while he is trying to state one? He covers this by saying in a simulated society seemingly opposite things can be “simultaneously true” (464), but how if NOTHING is true. Further, if nothing is true than there is no good or evil. Scratch that. Let's go bigger, there is not even such a thing as right and wrong. So then the “monstrous unprincipled enterprise” (463) of capital isn’t really “monstrous” or “unprincipled” at all. How can it be? Everything is dead and neutral. We are left standing in front of this beast of a simulated society with no weapons. Baudrillard was trying to arm us against it, but it seems he did the exact opposite. He says it is impossible to return to the real at this point, and if we can’t get there we have no solid ground to fight on. This is the only think I dislike about Baudrillard, its complete hopelessness. But the fact that I search for a “truth” and an “answer” to these extremely complex problems is perhaps part of the actual problem itself. I’m looking for a way out when there isn’t one.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was?