Navel-gazing...
... that's the term Jean Baudrillard is searching for in the following excerpt. Navel-gazing.
from A M E R I C A, by Jean Baudrillard (1986)
[Translated in 1988 by Chris Turner from the original in French, Amerique. Excerpt posted here.]
... This is echoed by the other obsession: that of being 'into', hooked in to your own brain. What people are contemplating on their word-processor screens is the operation of their own brains. It is not entrails that we try to interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions; it is, quite simply, the brain. We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch it operating like a video-game. All this cerebral, electronic snobbery is hugely affected - far from being the sign of a superior knowledge of humanity, it is merely the mark of a simplified theory, since the human being is here reduced to the terminal excrescence of his or her spinal chord. But we should not worry too much about this: it is all much less scientific, less functional than is ordinarily thought. All that fascinates us is the spectacle of the brain and its workings. What we are wanting here is to see our thoughts unfolding before us - and this itself is a superstition.
Hence, the academic grappling with his computer, ceaselessly correcting, reworking, and complexifying, turning the exercise into a kind of interminable psychoanalysis, memorizing everything in an effort to escape the final outcome, to delay the day of reckoning of death, and that other - fatal - moment of reckoning that is writing, by forming an endless feed-back loop with the machine. This is a marvellous instrument of exoteric magic. In fact all these interactions come down in the end to endless exchanges with a machine. Just look at the child sitting in front of his computer at school; do you think he has been made interactive, opened up to the world? Child and machine have merely been joined together in an integrated circuit. As for the intellectual, he has at last found the equivalent of what the teenager gets from his stereo and his walkman: a spectacular desublimation of thought, his concepts as images on a screen. (35-36)
I do not accept his blanket condemnation of [American] academic writers as navel-gazers. However, what he implies about education and its too-facile assumption that a child set to work on a computer is learning more and learning it more actively, more interactively is chilling in its clear-sightedness. And. Although he does not mention us, I cannot help but think that the chief population he has diagnosed in this passage is the international (not merely American) blogging community.
Just shooting this out there on a quiet Sunday evening.
from A M E R I C A, by Jean Baudrillard (1986)
[Translated in 1988 by Chris Turner from the original in French, Amerique. Excerpt posted here.]
... This is echoed by the other obsession: that of being 'into', hooked in to your own brain. What people are contemplating on their word-processor screens is the operation of their own brains. It is not entrails that we try to interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions; it is, quite simply, the brain. We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch it operating like a video-game. All this cerebral, electronic snobbery is hugely affected - far from being the sign of a superior knowledge of humanity, it is merely the mark of a simplified theory, since the human being is here reduced to the terminal excrescence of his or her spinal chord. But we should not worry too much about this: it is all much less scientific, less functional than is ordinarily thought. All that fascinates us is the spectacle of the brain and its workings. What we are wanting here is to see our thoughts unfolding before us - and this itself is a superstition.
Hence, the academic grappling with his computer, ceaselessly correcting, reworking, and complexifying, turning the exercise into a kind of interminable psychoanalysis, memorizing everything in an effort to escape the final outcome, to delay the day of reckoning of death, and that other - fatal - moment of reckoning that is writing, by forming an endless feed-back loop with the machine. This is a marvellous instrument of exoteric magic. In fact all these interactions come down in the end to endless exchanges with a machine. Just look at the child sitting in front of his computer at school; do you think he has been made interactive, opened up to the world? Child and machine have merely been joined together in an integrated circuit. As for the intellectual, he has at last found the equivalent of what the teenager gets from his stereo and his walkman: a spectacular desublimation of thought, his concepts as images on a screen. (35-36)
I do not accept his blanket condemnation of [American] academic writers as navel-gazers. However, what he implies about education and its too-facile assumption that a child set to work on a computer is learning more and learning it more actively, more interactively is chilling in its clear-sightedness. And. Although he does not mention us, I cannot help but think that the chief population he has diagnosed in this passage is the international (not merely American) blogging community.
Just shooting this out there on a quiet Sunday evening.