Navel-gazing...

[conversant]

... 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

Comments

[conversant]

You are quite right to point out the historical moment of B's commentary, and I like the idea that he was picturing a child sitting at an Apple IIe (on which I am old enough to have worked myself). It is quite true that when he wrote this, he was not writing about blogging or any other aspect of internet use. That said, it is possible to begin with his point and imagine that it has only become more true: there is something to his accusation that technology produces conditions that isolate human beings (true for those who decide to stay home and read their flists instead of going out into the world beyond their homes/offices/desktops). There is even a certain amount of fire beneath the smoke of his accusation that academic writers (society's supposed great thinkers) engage more with themselves than with anything of any use to anyone else. However -- as the conversation this post has generated illustrates -- Baudrillard's critique is also unfair and in-sufficiently founded. It appeals to our pessimistic and self-critical instincts (the appeal it had for me last night), but it works very much like political rhetoric about lazy "welfare queens" (or self-inflated French philosophers!) by conjuring an image of social decline and individual self-absorption that plays to our least analytical modes of thinking, our prejudices and presuppositions. It's relatively easy, thank goodness, to see utility -- social and individual benefit -- in the internet and in the technologies that have delivered it to our desktops.

My post didn't really merit the real conversation it received, but I'm glad that a few folks were interested in proving that blogging can occasion real exchanges of ideas, that it can transcend navel-gazing.