P.S.: and please, PLEASE, do not ever quote contemporary punk-rock lyrics to me again in the stead of making an actual theoretical argument. I promise, I will find you and smack you upside the head with a copy of Green Day’s _Tour Diary_ I will for that purpose buy at Wal Mart.

**this has been a communicee by the Judean People’s Front**

Whatever the actual critical force and ideological purchase of this argument, it seems to point to me at an interesting and enduring question: what is the value of assuming that there are true needs, a correct form of consciousness and a space exterior to the hyperreal we can return to? Is there any political value in this? Does this logic not always run the risk of necessitating vanguard politics? Does opposing this kind of “return to the real” idea truly have to result in a form of hopelessness and political inactivity?
questions, questions, …

P.S.: yes, this is the good old argument that made Baudrillard rather unpopular with traditional Marxism. He suggested that Marxism might not be the opposite of capitalism any more. From all of our recent discussion this is actually a statement that can purely as an heuristic be used to produce some interesting insights. Also, it seems to me to be at least partially true–especially dogmatic Marxism, or its various perverted forms one encounters in certain political groups falls exactly into the group to which B’s criticism is applicable. There is, however, great stuff in Marx’s own writings that make logically a very similar argument and are incredibly important for an accurate account of contemporary capitalism. Sadly, oftentimes Marxists are strangely so hostile to changing their analytical system (something Marx always emphasized must be the case) that they do not see the radical sections on change and the sections that directly apply to our present context (i.e. on capitalism and instability) that are contained in Marx’s work.

The split between public and private sphere is definitely one of the trademarks of computer-mediated society (I put that on the list of my To-Considers for my PhD proposal – still not sure whether I am going to submit it or not, but if I do, it’d have to happen soon). Having read your post, I suppose that one can say the same of the postmodern society (they coincide anyway, but are they the same? To be explored). Something written in the privacy of the HCI (human computer interface) seems to be oddly ‘not public’, at least not in the sense that this type of publicity would imply the opposite of privacy. I blog about the most personal things that would have caused a huge fight between my mom and I as a kid had I ever gotten to know that she’d read it. Not intended for her! But these days, any stranger is most welcome to. I am very picky about the real life people with whom I share my blog address – but the VR stranger, engaging in comments, is most welcome…

But let’s forget that for the moment.

Turning back to JB.

I very much like this idea of the training programme – it pinpoints exactly what has been puzzling me about present society/culture. Today I stood at a station 30 km away from here, gazing at the teenagers that loitered there, set against the backdrop of the rising mountains (thought of taking a photograph for you, but my cellphone camera is not good enough). I’ve often said to myself how glad I was that I am already my age:-) And when it comes to education and raising children, I would say the most important thing is to allow them to become immune towards the incentives to partake in the training programme. I do admire my uncle and his wife in that respect, who is a fairly ‘old’ father (50 kids, 3 and 7). They don’t have a TV, I don’t know anyone who devotes more quality time to their children (it wouldn’t be called that here though;-) and they have started to teach them to play instruments and made sure they engage in theatre plays etc. very early. The aim of such an anti-programme that I have in mind would be to give children something to allow them to develop a personality that is so rich and multi-facetted that they’d become immune towards the instant gratifications the consumer culture has to offer.

Which also means that I believe that – consumer culture or not – there is an innate desire within each of mankind to develop, to engage in what you called the dialectical process of socialisation, to become ‘ a human’.

I’ve wrote such things before – I really am a humanist through and through. And an optimist, surprisingly, when I look at the power of education. A pessimist, again, when I look at the masses, e.g. those teenagers clad in their ridiculous collection of fashion items … moon boots, bizarre beanies, low riders with hips springing up above the waistband, boys, exposing their underwear, identical manga hairstyles, cell phones glued to their ear or held in their hand, playing identical nonsensical and little edifying tunes, cigarette in mouth… the people I’ll teach in three years if I don’t get out of here soon!

Will print this and get back – the first about the trainings camp already made sense to my flimsy mind, just need to go about a couple of classroom preparations first.

Looking forward the affective labour strand. Am still reading PR (Greg read it in one day; I think I enjoy it to much to want to read it quickly) and find the tension that builds up almost unbearable at points. But I am just very receptive to fictional stimuli, so that’s normal.

you write: “The question: If the superego has been annulled/abolished, how/why can it reemerge as a censor (personalized in the object)?”

Maybe a good way to think about this would be in terms of the split between public and private sphere. The traditional superego bridges precisely these two elements (wich is why I think that the distinction between pleasure principle and reality principle actually still has more critical rigor than the Habermassian split, as Freud focuses on what is ultimately important: consciousness). In other words, the superego is the mediator between individual impulses and public discourse. It is responsible for processes of socialization that lead to a dialectical form of consciousness. In Hegelian words, what Baudrillard describes is the end of the dialectic due to consumer capitalism, where the superego as a structuring principle for society is removed from the private sphere (i.e. it is no longer the possible for capitalism to operate upon centralized mechanisms of regulation and repression, the principles that characterized the previous capitalist stage) and is absorbed and therefore contained in the rampant individualism of the private shpere. There it works again as a censor, but this time as a censor that is not the basis for a dialectical process of socialization, but rather a personaized and individualized training program within which the individual desires that drive capitalism are constructed. It is thus singularly the liberation of the drive, of individual desire, not of the individual proper, that characterizes the “freedom” of neoliberal capitalism. It is not an overall, social freedom, as the social dimension is increasingly deconstructed (and not just as part of the logic of privatization and the deconstruction of the state, even though this could serve as one material example). What Baudrillard thus wants to criticize are the ways in which contemporary capitalism operates upon the level of desire, which is the truly productive force in an increasingly immaterial economy. Hence the liberation of drives equals not only the dismantling of society and dialectical forms of developing consciousness, but also equals the individualization of society, however an individualization in a post-Foucauldian sense (i.e. individualization is no longer connected to Foucauldian categorization for the purpose of classification and surveillance–these strategies have become entirely obsolete in contemporary capitalism, as well as contemporary society–as you will see in Cayce Pollard’s case: surveillance is not something new, it is just how stuff is done at the moment–it is the dominant logic–however it is not meant to have a repressive, but a liberating/productive effect–it is encouraging).
Ok, granted, this may be more my own theory taken from my dissertation that Baudrillard’s own words, but I think that this is precisely the ways Baudrillard’s logic worked back then and is in slightly altered form can work to describe the present situation, which essentially is characterized by an acceleration of the trends Baudrillard points out.

It’s always a pleasure to read you on this blog, but the PhD comes first!

Kraft und Energie derweil!