Thursday, March 8, 2007

Re: Baudrillard and 9/11

I don't have a good answer to your question, Chris. I do believe that Richard Wolin is an unfair critic, though. A couple of years ago, I read his book "The Seduction of Unreason," in which he investigates postmodernism's debt to proto-fascist ideas and attitudes. It's an impressive piece of scholarship, but spoiled (for me) by Wolin's wholesale rejection of postmodernism on the grounds that, if Baudrillard, et al., are right, and the workings of power do persist in defiance of even the best-intentioned efforts to disrupt them, then "the emancipatory hopes of the vast majority of men and women seem consigned in advance to frustration and disappointment."

That strikes me as a case of killing the messenger: Baudrillard makes progressive types unhappy because he argues persuasively that our enlightened political schemes will end in frustration, so therefore we should reject him and everything he's written? Instead, it seems to me, we should think of Baudrillard, like other postmodernists, as an enlightener of the Enlightenment.

Speaking of the Enlightenment, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Bush administration and many others in the West wanted very much to convince us that the World Trade Center was destroyed because the Islamo-fascists hate our freedoms, i.e., they hate the Enlightenment. Liberal hawks quickly distanced themselves from postmodernist leftists critical of aspects of the Enlightenment; ironically, this put them in bed with the Intelligent Design-promoting Bush administration, which some liberals have since regretted. But we all remember this stuff.

Baudrillard courageously piped up -- from France, no less, a country full of surrender monkeys who also seemed to hate our freedoms -- and claimed that 9/11 had nothing to do with a clash of civilizations or religions. (Sorry, saber-rattling journalists and intellectuals eager to start a new Crusade against the unenlightened East.) Instead, he insisted, the terrorists were striking a blow against globalization: The World Trade Center was a symbol, around the world, not of America and its freedoms, but of capitalism triumphant, he claimed; the twin towers were a symbol, at a deeper level, of the perceived lack of alternatives, the closing off of even the possibility of imagining any non-neoliberal modes of organizing the world's societies and economies.

As you can imagine, this line of thinking got everybody upset.

UPDATE
More from Brainiac: R.I.P., Baudrillard | Baudrillard and 'The Matrix' | Baudrillard obit and mailbag | More Baudrillard obits | Baudrillard and 9/11 | Re: Baudrillard and 9/11 |

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 04:13 PM

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