baudrillard's a lonely lonely man

Baudrillard's blurb reminded me of most of our reading so far. With Debord's description of the self perpetuating cycle of spectacle to McLuhn's talk about the media, Baudrillard echoes the notion that the ways in which we form meaning, especially in light of new media and information technologies, are not only pervasive, but so far removed from the realm of gritty, verifiable fact and fiction. Now society can tout whatever it wants and someone somewhere will regard it as reality based.

This idea of a metaphysics and poetry existing between the space of something actual and its translation into a map, book, television show, etc, is interesting. The idea that this metaphysical, 'magical' quality is lost when something is based on something that was never tied to its original source of inspiration is also interesting. But I guess Baudrillard is very suspicious of this because he thinks it diluted reality. My issue with what he is saying is because I err on the postmodern side of truth anyway and feel that this more direct pure relation between the terrain the cartographers attempts to map it never really existed. It sounds like Baudrillard was getting nostalgic.

In my own undergraduate field of cultural anthropology, I witnessed a college program undergo a sort of crisis (well, not quite) when it decided to change the name of it's major to "critical theory and social justice." The department's new understanding of the whole field of anthropology was that it had been, for too long, grounded in false notions of true unadulterated objectivity in the ethnographer's field work. The consensus was that no anthropologist was capable of writing about another culture without writing jane eyre, or some very personalized, two-cent novel reflecting their own pathetic lives. I thought the acknowledgment between ethnographic writing and humanities writing made sense. It took the pressure of objectivity out of the picture and it made it more fun. Did it dilute the field of anthropology?...probably. So maybe Baudrillard was right.