Book Review: The Perfect Crime (Jean Baudrillard)

Genre: Philosophy
Themes: Post-Structuralism

Content

Baudrillard's cynical examination the "murder of reality" disinters discomfiting problems in our models of world that we would rather bury in a nebulous cloud of unknowing. This is cynical work that radically denies the possibility of any all-embracing epistemology - of any meaning or finality.

He begins his discourse on the "Spectre of Will" with the plausible but unprovable assertion that: "The radical illusion is that of the original crime, by which the world is altered from the beginning, and is never identical to itself, never real. The world exists only through this definitive illusion which is that play of appearances - the very site of the unceasing disappearance of all meaning and all finality." At the very end of the chapter, he acknowledges that this insight is derived apart from the Reason itself, being somehow "deduced" outside of the world's continuity: "There is a continuity of the world, as it has meaning for us, and the continuity of the world as, in secret, it is nothing and means nothing. This latter does not, strictly speaking, exist. It cannot be verified, but can only betray itself, only show through like evil, squint out through appearances."

Scene from the movie "Inception"

None of these ideas are new or difficult, and many have seen the light of day in popular culture, in the form of films such as the "Matrix" and "Inception". However, no one seriously contemplates their possibility or lives their lives with any serious reference to it, outside of religious belief. Certainly we Christians all believe that whatever lies behind the play of "appearances" or phenomena is a benign God rather than a perverse being, or utter randomness. However, for an agnostic like Baudrillard, this is precisely the problem, that of an "unbearable hypothesis" that seems to condemn the search for meaning, the acknowledgment of the futility of discursive methods when approaching questions of ultimate significance. At times, the terminology is outright confusing, if not seems to contain an implicit contradiction: "There will always be more reality, because it is produced and reproduced by simulation, and is itself merely a model of simulation. What within truth is merely truth falls foul of illusion. What within truth exceeds truth is of the order of a higher illusion. Only what exceeds reality can go beyond the illusion of reality." Too many truths, too many realities, too many illusions, and what looks like a blank assertion that denies the possibility of any assertion whatsoever, which to him, is precisely the point! Either a case of circular logic, or a case of pure ex-hypothesi, which is like high treason in Philosophy. Perhaps it is natural that a work that denies the value of clarity itself takes on an elusive character.

Naturally, his work seeks to undermine the assumptions that undergird analytical philosophy, which of course is conducive to the use of the empirical method and rejects the relevance of anything else. One imagines each of Baudrillard's poisonous assertions trailing forward like an endless stream of sappers digging at the foot of a wall protecting a great edifice, in what looks like a sustained attack on the key features in the structuralist understanding. Baudrillard refutes the possibility or even meaningfulness of uncovering a unitary scheme in all branches of human knowledge, although whether this attack constitutes merely a temporary breach in the walls, or will culminate at a lethal thrust into the heart of a citadel that is Analytical Philosophy, is yet unseen. What makes Baudrillard's work unique is his focus on technology and the flow of information, from which example he deduces the arbitrariness, malleability and incoherence of the structures around which we organize our lives. He traces the moral implications of such a "post-structuralist understanding" with the relentless cold-bloodedness of an assassin tracking his victim, and in this respect at least, occasionally takes one or two deft strokes with the lethal keenness of an executioner. "Information is simply the paradoxical confusion of event and the medium, and the political uncertainty which ensues. So we have all become ready-mades. Hypostatized like the bottle-rack, our sterile identities taxidermized, we have become living museum pieces... and condemned by that exact resemblance, to media stupefaction." He rightly suggests that: "At the peak of our technological performance, the irresistible impression remains that something eludes us  not because we seem to have lost it, but because we are no longer in a position to see it: that, in effect, it is nto we who are winning out over the world, but the world which is winning out over us."

Style

The Guardian describes Baudrillard, with justification, as a "prophet of the apocalypse, hysterical lyricist of panic, obsessive recounter of the desolation of the postmodern scene and the hottest property on the New York intellectual circuit." Baudrillard exudes the aura of a modern Diogenes, a lunatic in the spell of disturbing truths and fixated on the penumbra of uncertainty that surrounds discursive thought. As one would expect from one of the pioneers of deconstructionism and post-structuralism, Baudrillard is contemptous of the interpretive structures of reality we have erected within our fragile psyches, and takes liberties with all traditional categories of sense and reason, including that of language.

"Truthiness"
It easy to succumb, intellectually, to the domineering verve and muscular verse of Jean Baudrillard, whose thoughts achieve sweet fruition in his seminal work "The Perfect Crime". However, analysed in the cold light of day, Baudrillard's mind is inconsistent, at times utterly obscurantist, at other times keenly logical and discursive, as would befit a philosopher in the French tradition. If the lyrical power and aesthetic potential in his verse is intoxicating, then the chaotic organization of the text makes you wonder if the book was written in a state of inebriation and disorientation similar to that which the Author sought to impose upon his Readers. If you are hoping for more clarity, and a source of practical wisdom, what the Greeks call "prudence", then avoid this book. If you want something that stretches you and unsettles and to engage in act of creative destruction that demolishes old stereotypes and inane categories that you can't quite figure your way out of, then this book is for you. The heavy obscurantism sometimes weighs down on  the poetic feel and artistry of his text, which would otherwise shine through very strongly. Like that of many French writers, his in-your-face erudition tends to work in opposition to style rather than facilitating it, and sometimes you detect what might well  be signs of careless usage and confounded logic (the French philosophers, after the order of Foucault, make no pretenses about accuracy).  His dense vocabulary and heavily ornamented verse would doubtlessly anger proponents of lean prose and sparse verse. Even if you disagree with his radical premises - none of which detract from the kernels of insight scattered throughout the text, you feel compelled to admire the beautiful but disturbing thrall cast by this slim, even innocuous, but densely-packed volume.

"The Transparent Simulacrum of the Feigned" by Salvador Dali

Book Review - Gravity and Grace (Simone Weil)

Simone Weil - observe her handsome rather than beautiful appearance

This enigmatic figure draws heavily from Buddhism and Eastern philosophy in her mystical exploration of Christianity. Her accounts of grace often square closely with Christian orthodoxy, even if there are elements of Marcionism (gnosticism) in her treatment of the Old Testament and her repudiation of the sacred character of the Israeli nation, as an institution uniquely blessed and set apart by God for the redemption of the World.

She brings her considerable intellect to bear in this epic text "Gravity and Grace", which spans the gamut of her thinking on profound themes such as "Gravity and Grace", "Void and Compensation", "Decreation", "Necessity and Obedience", "Idolatry" and "Love". Her expositon of these themes is not organized, but one gets the impression of a text consisting, in the main of, a loose collection of difficult-to-understand aphorisms with a strong poetic quality.

"Gravity and Grace" by James Melinat

It is her tendency to make sweeping generalizations, however, that discredits her work. For instance, Weil writes the following in her chapter on Gravity and Grace: "All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. We must always expect things to happen in conformity with the laws of gravity unless there is supernatural intervention." There is hardly anything controversial in this Augustinian or Platonic account of grace, which is found in the scholastics and reeks everywhere of Aquinas, but is nowadays generally rejected by many Protestants and the Orthodox (who are outright semi-Pelagian). By denying the presence of intermediate or inferior means in nature that are themselves strictly speaking the result of Grace, she wholehandedly rejects the validity of the Church's experience, and the whole dialogue between the Word and the World. In her Manichean schema, there is no place for such a dialogue, no place for a process of "traditionizing" and "interpreting". Her's is literally a bipolar world, with unique binary oppositions, a nasty composite of duplexes.

Weil also writes: "The contemplation of human misery wrenches us in the direction of God, and it is only in others whom we love as ourselves, that we can contemplate it. We can neither contemplate it in ourselves as such nor in others as such." Again, one can immediately refute this from experience as out of hand. Affliction can both harden, leading to bitterness, or provide a ground of understanding and thus lead to empathy, as both Scripture and common sense attest to. The direction in which this contemplation takes us, depends precisely on the disposition of the person in question, and no generalization is possible. We are either calloused by suffering, or being chastised, our hard hearts are broken up. All depends on, of course, faith, the inexplicable gift of Grace.
She also writes rather enigmatically: "Everything which is gripped by our natural faculties is hypothetical. It is only supernatural love that establishes everything. Thus we are co-creators." Her book is riven throughout by indecipherable connections such as these, which seem to carry a kernel of isolated meaning and insight, but remain unconnected to the rest of the text. It is easy to understand how "everything gripped by our natural faculties is hypothetical" but what relation this bears to the "supernatural love that establishes everything" and how this implies "co-creation" is unexplained. Elliptical verses like these are perhaps part of the reason why philosophy is easier than it is made out to be, much of the difficulty arises from the ambiguity of the philosopher on the said concept, rather than a defect of the reader's intelligence. And her gnomic hodge-podge of aphorisms is shot through with ellipses like these.

On Contradiction, however, she astutely observes: "All true good carries with it conditions that are contradictory, and as a consequence, impossible. He who keeps his attention fixed on this impossibility and acts will do what is good." There is a point at which an analysis of good and evil in terms of their fundamental exponents, quite apart from one's feeling-sentiments, leads one to a disturbing point where one's cherished values seem so arbitrary. Anyone who has engaged himself beyond his natural capacities or beyond the limits of prudence, in the serious pursuit of God, of Truth and of Goodness, stumbles into what theologians call the "dark night of the soul", where everything seems meaningless, even futile. As the Jews were the first to truly understand, the Holy is the dangerous, and approaching the Numinous on our own initiative can be lethal.

On the role of the intellect in the mystical life, she avers that it is not to be shunned, but rather cultivated: "Intelligence can never penetrate the mystery, but it, and it alone, can judge the suitability of the words which express it. For this task, it needs to be keener, more discerning, more precise, more exact and more exacting than any other." As a non-mystic myself (except in occasional moments of prayer and meditation on the Word as become an ordinary Christian), I cannot assess the validity of this assertion, other than to say that Christian meditation is a thing different from Eastern meditation. As Foster, my favourite Puritan says: "Eastern meditation is an attempt to empty the mind; Christian meditation is an attempt to empty the mind in order to fill it." It is precisely the second limb, which Simone Weil, in my humble opinion, seems to lack, and which makes her putatively Christian faith (which she describes as the least of the lies in a world full of Lies) sometimes seem like a trendy fusion between Christianity and Buddhism. Whatever one's position on the matter (and mine is firmly entrenched in the Apostolic Tradition), Simone Weil cannot be accused of inconsistency. She literally worked herself to death for the sake of the Other, and during the invasion of France by Germany, finally perished from consumption. Her stringently ethical character are perhaps the only perceptible traces of Jewish ascetism that has been taken over by an abstracted voided form of "Platonic Christianity" shorn of its forms, references and ultimate ends, and with a yogic accent.

Book Review: The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence (Baltasar Gracian )

Written by a Spanish Jesuit priest living in the 17th century, the Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence is the golden container of exactly 300 aphorisms, each of sparkling beauty, and all designed to guide a ruler in the affairs of life. All are written with matchless verve and inimitable wit, which make the book a congenial read. Most are so fitly spoken, that they may well exemplify the "apples of gold in settings of silver" the Bible extols. Literary style and elegance aside, which facilitates the commission of text to memory,  the book stands out as a superb source of practical advice, outstripping Marcus Aurelius and Schopenhauer in the genre of wisdom literature. The author synthesizes the wisdom of the East and the West to produce a work applicable across the ages. One does not need to be a ruler or businessperson to profit from Baltasar's sagely work, and many aphorisms are directed towards the improvement of talent, the management of relationships and the management of personal affairs. 

All except for 3 aphorisms are consistent with traditional Christian morality in their insistence on virtue, which the author describes in a way that is compatible sagacity, talent and intellect. The 3 aphorisms that stand apart, do so for their apparent ruthlessness, their concession to human weakness and the need for expedient action in Machiavellian world of realpolitik, and I will not list them here. It is perhaps by way of compensation that Baltasar, a Jesuit priest, concludes the book with on a strong ethical note, from which the various threads of the book finally converge:

"Virtue links all perfections and is the centre of all happiness. It makes a person prudent, circumspect, shrewd, sensible, wise, brave, restrained, upright, happy, praiseworthy, a true and comprehensive hero. Three S's make someone blessed: being saintly, sound and sage. Virtue is the sun of the little world of man and its hemisphere is a clear conscience. It is so fine, it gains the favour of both God and mankind."

Although plodding minds decry the excessive use of metaphor and literary flourish and perceive that the text is nothing more but cryptic collection of gnomic sayings, the clever use of rich allegory by way of exposition makes the intended meaning indisputable. This text is as entertaining as it is profound - a rare jewel, and exemplar of Spanish baroque. This is a useful text that, for the most part, which provides advice on how to navigate the rocky shoals of virtue, without slipping into the stupidity of ingenue nor ruthless expedience. As Schopenhauer puts it: "a constant companion". One might very well enjoy it for its aesthetic qualities as much as for its subtility.

Culture Blog - What this blog is about



This is an attempt by a 29 year old man, now approaching the dreadful third decade of his life (perhaps its very summit!), and driven by various existential needs, to attain the following:

(a) A measure of self-understanding by attentively parsing the world around him, with a special interest in how the cultural orbit in which we move, and the historical baggage that we carry with us, affects the construction of meaning and how this meaning-pattern evolves through the ages, and its implications for the individual;

(b) An understanding of the "world-as-history", as an object of interest and curiosity and a thing of value in itself, i.e. for its own sake. Of course, one cannot neglect to mention the impetus provided by pleasure brought about by the study of the myriad forms through which human concerns have expressed themselves.

These two purposes may thus be but different faces of the same coin, aspects of the same goal. Inasmuch as what we know is commensurate with the sum of the world (at least as it expresses itself is our psyches) that we have become conscious of, and the sum of what we have become conscious of (or were once conscious of) is in turn the full measure of our humanity, then it follows by way of syllogism, that this impulse towards greater knowledge (that is, the concretization of understandings about both the world and my own mind) is nothing less than an attempt to actualize my humanity to the fullest extent possible. An attempt to bring everything that was potential into the realm of the actual. The use a Pauline expression - to know as I am known (by the world), not out of a radical intellectual conceit, but out of the peculiar destiny of a man with a strange inclination to subject all things to analysis, and to improve himself to the farthest extent, which as you probably can tell, I believe are really one and the same thing, and part of the masculine need for extension and assertion.

To this end, I have taken a heteromodal approach:

(i) bottom-up - at the level of the particular, by recording my own responses to literature and art, in whatever form, that comes my way
(ii) top-down - at a higher level of generality, by analysing these responses in terms of what is customary to the genre of that art or a particular culture
(iii) horizontal - by exploring the relationship between the forms that have arisen in disparate genres, mediums and even particular works
(iv) temporal - by exploring how these forms evolve over time

Conscious life is a continuous dialogue between a Subject and a multitude of Objects that mutually contain and interpenetrate one another on the stage of the psyche. This cannot be understood without a deep feeling for the gravitational pull that the "constellations of associations" and "interrelations of meaning" that have been adopted and shaped by our ancestors exert over our own minds, and that we in turn shape for future generations. This inner world of assocations and meanings determines not merely the forms in which this Subject-Object dialectic takes place, but also inform the representation of the nature and qualities of Subject and Object in our own minds. It is hoped that through the contemplation and study of various cultures, the dynamic agencies that drive them can be discerned and abstracted, and that a coherent metaphysics might be constructed out of this archaeological expedition into the debris of the human mind and its objective past.

At a more instrumental level and jejune level, one could say that the purpose of this blog is to also force me to engage in a sort of disciplined approach to my reading, by offering me an outlet to analyse and offer a critique of the books I read, the movies I watch, the music I hear. I hope that this critique will also help you, in offering potential materials that you may in turn feast yourself upon.I will be reviewing and rating these books, movies, music and other articles of culture, for the purpose of our mutual edification, I the subject and You the object - the mirror of my mind, and We part of a common and inextricably linked reality that births all phenomena on the stage of the psyche. At a purely molecular or even basely mechanical level, this blog is about everything in popular culture that enriches the human mind, it is a loosely connected constellation of hasty observations that reflect the results of my communion with the world, expressed in the form of verse. It is that ineffable substance which my mind reciprocally secretes back into the world after having received something from it.



Waltz with Bashir

I like the movie Waltz with Bashir because of its portrayal of amnesia, and the overall feeling of estrangement from reality that results when one cannot quite connect the past with the present. In many ways, my endeavour is inspired by a similar feeling. Because I identify so much with things that are fully human, and refuse to see myself as nothing but a collection of atoms or an ever-decomposing concoction of chemicals held together by elastase, I am forced to examine the nature of the divide that separates the psyche from the world, and explore the nature of the Subject-Object dichotomy that Buber so poetically articulated and Foucalt extended. To borrow a term from Baudrillard, man is at the center of a Perfect Crime, that estrangement of the Ideal from the Real, and the twofold alienation of the Self from the World and from God. We do not know who has perpetrated this Perfect Crime or whether it is sensible to even ask that question. All we know is that the mystery must ultimately resolved, and to that end, we are left with the collective debris of our ancestors' actions, and their memoirs in the form of a written history, which constitutes the patchy evidence with which we are left to fill in the gaps in our psyche. In some way, we are all amnesiacs, and the gaps in the collective memory of the human race are precisely those lacunae that confute an understanding of our situation "in an ever-present future".

I apologise for the prolixity of the prose, which I will progressively pare down as these ideas coalesce, and take solid form in my head, which will surely render them more readable. I deliberately did play a few intellectual tricks here and there to test the response and perhaps disorient readers. I aim to strike a delicate balance to resolve the tension inherent in the competing needs of self-satisfaction, which comes from writing rich prose, and comprehensibility, which is the fruit of sparsity, sometimes idiocity. For that temporary excess, I must thank the multiplicity of authors from a wide-ranging assortisement of disciplines whose speculations, hypotheses, articulations and analogies now impinge, like a swelling crowd, on the rather narrow stage of my mind. Acknowledgements to the following influences:

Psychology - Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Erich Fromm
Philosophy - Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, Wittgenstein, Aurelius, Bacon, Aristotle, Plato
Religion - Jean Calvin, Martin Luther, Erasmus, Martin Buber, Aquinas, Augustine
Culture - Lin Yu Tang, Oswald Spengler
History - Felipe De Armesto
Literature - Baltasar Gracian, Oscar Wilde

If you liked this blog, you may be interested in my essays, currently dispersed amongst other blogs:

Meditations on the Faith
http://meditationsonthefaith.blogspot.com/2011/11/purpose-of-blog.html#!/
Contains some of my theological reflections.

A Little Illumination
http://sekhelmazhir.blogspot.com/view/magazine
My attempt to draw inspiration from the interconnected fields of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience.