Even the question of the very possibility of knowing what one does in discussing(?) Baudrillard's writing creates difficulties. A paleo-Marxist would perhaps feel s/he had a place to stand from which to speak intelligently and intelligibly about the (un?)importance of Baudrillard. Having no such self-referential, modernist, ideological foundation I find myself balking again and again, even at the reference to my own subjectivity: I.
Baudrillard does not write in the mode of traditional argument or critique, especially in his later works. So, to question the factuality of his support is to miss the point altogether. You have to give him his assumptions in a spirit of creativity and invention and then, having been moved, attempt to regain your bearings.
I have definitely been moved. I have not, however, found my bearings and do not expect to. The Baudrillardian topology shifts even when I (you? we? it? language?) feel(s) I am still.
Perhaps then, this medium, hypertext, provides the right massage for the project of thinking Baudrillard. Radically inclusive, hypertext invites constant revision through addition, allows contradictions (without which there is no Baudrillard, and perhaps no thought?), invites participation, and importantly, never concludes.
In an epistemology which denies representation, meaning and agency, only a medium which dramatizes the constant deferral of the very task at hand, the object of discussion, the subject which wants to see (eye), gives us the possibility of continuing.
While it would be pointless to try to hold Baudrillard (fix him) to his earlier writing, because he so constantly revised his ideas (notice how I cannot escape this intentional phallusy, so dependent are we on the narrative of subjectivity), I want to use (XXX no:) refer to (XXXXX XX no:) employ (XXXXXX no:) draw upon (ambiguous enough, ok).... I want to draw upon something from an earlier work of his, *The Mirror of Production* (1973) to illustrate my approach to this project. THIS PROJECT AVOIDS PRODUCTION.
I was going to write THIS PROJECT IS SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED TO AVOID PRODUCTION, but you see the problem in that figure: This project is not designed at all.
THIS PROJECT WANTS TO BE CONSUMPTIVE. Eye
definitely am being consumed. The reader should be consumed by it.
It has no boundaries. It has no process. It was not composed, because that
would imply an author. There is an author's name, but no author. I have
been consumed by the project.
