Abstract
‘Forget Foucault’ was Baudrillard’s title for a nifty piece of polemics which, in the current French manner, staked his claim to be ‘post-’, just about everything, post-structuralism and Foucault included.1 I think we would do well to forget Baudrillard, though not without treating his texts to more in the way of argued critique than Baudrillard sees fit to provide when dealing with his own precursors and rivals on the intellectual scene. Baudrillard is undoubtedly the one who has gone furthest toward renouncing enlightenment reason and all its works, from the Kantian-liberal agenda to Marxism, Frankfurt Critical Theory, the structuralist ‘sciences of man’, and even — on his view — the residual theoreticist delusions of a thinker like Foucault. The nearest equivalents are Richard Rorty’s brand of postmodern neopragmatist anti-philosophy and the strain of so-called ‘weak thought’ (not unaptly so called) that has lately been canvassed by Gianni Vattimo and other Heideggerian apostles of unreason.2 But one suspects that Baudrillard would reject these comparisons, regarding them as moves in a pointless game whose rule-book has been endlessly re-written and should now be torn up for good and all.
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Notes and References
Jean Baudrillard, Oublier Foucault (Paris: Edition Galilée, 1977).
Trans. Nicole Dufresne, ‘Forgetting Foucault’, Humanities In Society, No. 3 (Winter, 1980), pp. 87–111.
See, for instance, Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988).
Jean Baudrillard: selected writings, ed. Mark Poster (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988). All further references to this volume given by page-number only in the text.
See the essays collected in Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).
Jean-François Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition: a report on knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington & Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).
See, for instance, Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1977).
See especially Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’, in Walter Kaufmann (trans. & ed.), The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking, 1954), pp. 42–7.
See Baudrillard, Les Stratégies Fatales (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1983). Also Poster (op. cit.), pp. 185–206, for a partial translation of this text.
There is a rapidly growing body of work on this question of ‘nuclear criticism’ and on the possible uses of textual theory (semiotics, post-structuralism, deconstruction etc.) in analysing forms of nuclear-strategic doublethink. Baudrillard’s stance of extreme referential agnosticism is just one of the positions adopted by parties to this debate. Others have argued that we can, indeed must, maintain some version of critical realism — some means of addressing a ‘nuclear referent’ or real-world state of affairs — while acknowledging the extent to which perceptions of the arms-race are constructed in and through the various rhetorics which compete for public acceptance. By far the most ambitious attempt in this vein is J. Fisher Solomon’s Discourse and Reference in the Nuclear Age (Norman, Okl.: Oklahoma University Press, 1988). Solomon puts the case for a ‘potentialist’ metaphysics, one that would recognise the strictly unthinkable (aporetic) nature of the nuclear ‘real’, but not go on to argue — like Baudrillard — against any form of rational critique or resistance on principled grounds. The alternative, as he sees it, is to adopt something more like Aristotle’s view of the different criteria applicable to those objects, processes or events that exhibit a certain latent reality, a Tendenzraum or capacity for change that is none the less amenable to analysis.
On this topic see also the Cardiff Text Analysis Group, ‘Disarming Voices (a nuclear exchange)’, Textual Practice, Vol. II, No. 3 (Winter, 1988), pp. 381–93;
Jacques Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now: full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives’, Diacritics 14, No. 2 (Summer, 1984), pp. 20–31;
Michael Allen Fox and Leo Groarke (eds), Nuclear War (New York: Peter Lang, 1985);
Robert Mielke, ‘Imaging Nuclear Weaponry: an ethical taxonomy of nuclear representation’, Northwest Review, Vol. XXII, No. 1 (1982), pp. 164–80;
Christopher Norris, ‘Against Postmodernism: Derrida, Kant and nuclear polities’, Paragraph, Vol. IX (March, 1987), pp. 1–30;
Christopher Norris and Ian Whitehouse, ‘The Rhetoric of Deterrence’, in Nikolas Coupland (ed.), Styles Of Discourse (London: Croom Helm, 1988), pp. 293–322;
Daniel L. Zins, ‘Teaching English in a Nuclear Age’, College English, Vol. XLVII, No. 4 (1985), pp. 387–406.
See Louis Marin, Utopiques: jeux d’espace (Paris: Minuit, 1973).
See, for instance, Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (op. cit.)
and Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980).
See the essays by Fish and others collected in W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), Against Theory: literary theory and the new pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
Dick Hebdige, ‘After The Masses’, Marxism Today, January 1989, pp. 48–53; p. 51.
Ibid., p. 51.
For a useful recent account, see Barry Stroud, The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism (London: Oxford University Press, 1984).
Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, No. 146 (July/August 1984), pp. 53–92.
See the essays collected in Christopher Norris, Deconstruction and the Interests of Theory (London: Francis Pinter & Norman, Okl.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988).
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (London: Fontana, 1974).
See especially Louis Althusser, For Marx (op. cit.)
and Louis Althusser & Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1970).
See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: a selection, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: Tavistock, 1977).
See Louis Althusser, ‘Freud and Lacan’, in ‘Lenin and Philosophy’ and other essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), pp. 177–202.
See Gottlob Frege, ‘On Sense and Reference’, in Max Black & P. T. Geach (eds), Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952), pp. 56–78.
On this topic, see also Solomon (op. cit.) and Christopher Norris, ‘Sense, Reference and Logic: a critique of post-structuralist theory’, in The Contest of Faculties (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 47–69.
See especially Donald Davidson, ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (London: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 183–98.
Also Norris, ‘Reading Donald Davidson: truth, meaning and right interpretation’, in Deconstruction and the Interests of Theory (op. cit.), pp. 59–83.
Much of this work has to do with cases (so-called ‘Gettier problems’) where veridical knowledge involves something more than 1) believing X to be the case, and 2) having good grounds or evidential warrant for holding that belief. See Edmund Gettier’, ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’, Analysis, Vol. XXIII (1963), pp. 121–23.
For a useful survey of the subsequent debate, see Robert K. Shope, The Analysis of Knowing: a decade of research (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1983).
See for instance Karl-Otto Apel, Towards a Transformation of Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980).
For examples from two rather different traditions of thought, see P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1958)
and Hilary Putnam, Realism and Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
See especially G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978)
and Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
See also Alex Callinicos, Marxism and Philosophy (London: Oxford University Press, 1985)
and Robert Paul Wolff, Understanding Marx: a reconstruction and critique of Capital (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1984).
See for instance Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (London: Heinemann, 1979).
See Arthur Gavshon & Desmond Rice, The Sinking of the Belgrano (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1984), especially Appendix 7, ‘A Catalogue of Inconsistencies’, where they establish beyond doubt — on the principle of non-contradiction — that the British government put out more than one item of false propaganda.
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© 1990 Christopher Norris
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Norris, C. (1990). Lost in the Funhouse: Baudrillard and the Politics of Postmodernism. In: Boyne, R., Rattansi, A. (eds) Postmodernism and Society. Communications and Culture. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20843-2_5
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