an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 16, Fall/Winter 2019/2020, ISSN
1552-5112
Theory-Fictions, or the Last Horizon of Doubt
An excerpt from the
forthcoming book, Baudrillard’s
Castle: Notes From the Hinterland.
Today,
the novel Coronavirus of 2020 (now named COVID-19 by the UN’s WHO) looms over
all like a postmodern plague. It does so only because its virulence appears
uncontained. The AIDS and Ebola virus, and other notorious pathogens, enjoyed a
similarly historic arrival. Humankind’s sympathy and guilt for the fallen
angels of disease will not forgive its culpability for what humanity too, has
done to the world, its universe and one another in the form of its own virality.
The curse of globalized virulence, we have learned, in the end, will be met by
the miracle of universal prophylaxis, world quarantine and the closure of
Disneyland.
Sexuality,
ethnicity and talent in all of their forms have been
reduced to solicitation and slogan. For stakeholders in the game of pure
advertisement and reverse racial and sociocultural cronyism, a meaningful
performance now requires no real audience, and like (now extinct)
brass-buttoned theater ushers policing uniform aisles of the ancient picture
show, subscriber-audience member/followers can now police the uniformity of
their own meaningful response: all of which is relegated to the plastic
showcase of, not a museum exhibit, but a cellphone, always retrievably on
display as a postmodern, ever-streaming relic that ensures amusement for all as
an homage to some unremembered nostalgic past, where carnival actors earned
applause through performance, rather than entitlement. Royalty it seems, is
being renegotiated for the 21st century.
The
current fascination for one candidate, President or celebrity in America
reflects only the lack of imagination that passes freely for thought and
circulates throughout the country and world. President Trump is but one of a
long line of successors who continue to do their part to hasten the bitter end
while investing in global physical catastrophe. The philosophers continue their
forensic investigations into the corpses of ideology, awash and in awe of
production taking place, but remain incapable of escaping their own commercial
history of complicity and profit-taking. The metaphysics of capital,
unintelligible to most ‘master-thinkers’ of all disciplines, hurries the
arrival of degree zero of the species, where humankind will be revealed to
itself for what it truly is destined for - …
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 16, Fall/Winter
2019/2020, ISSN 1552-5112