Jean Baudrillard on culture of bitterness Part 2
This will be the case in the future, when information deserts form alongside the information arteries, there will be a sort of informational fourth world the refuge of all rogue states, all those who were rejected by the mass media. It will be supplemented by an intellectual desert inhabited by brains left without work due to the extreme complexity of the information networks themselves. It will be inhabited, but already in immeasurably greater quantity, descendants of those millions of unemployed who are now expelled from the world of work. Spaces, like people, become unemployed. Entire blocks of residential buildings and offices are being built, but they are doomed to remain empty forever because of an economic crisis or speculation.
They are waste, just waste and will always remain so, these are not traces of the past and not ruins, which still represent venerable monuments of antiquity.
These houses are monuments to the soullessness of a person’s entrepreneurial activity. And then I want to ask how civilization can hate and despise itself, which, from the very beginning, produces itself, and deliberately, in the form of garbage, works on its own useless construction, creating cities and metropolises like immense idle mechanisms reproducing themselves infinitely; These phantoms are the result of investments made to absurd amounts, as well as their increasing scarcity. Ghost towns, ghost people Cities ghosts, ghost people (English) approx. The human beings themselves reproduce themselves endlessly in the form of garbage or in the form of ordinary extras, whose destiny is to serve This idle mechanism, symbolizing a vicious cycle of production, when, contrary to the requirements of history, it is no longer Labor that reproduces Capital, but Capital indefinitely reproduces Labor.
The bitter fate of this expanding staff, who is destined to go into waste; So the person and after death continue to grow nails and hair. So, our culture has turned into the production of waste. If other cultures, as a result of a simple exchange cycle, produced a surplus and generated a culture of surplus (in the form of an unwanted and cursed child), then our culture produces a huge amount of waste that has become a real exchange value. People become the scum of their own garbage this is the characteristic feature of a society indifferent to its own values, a society that itself pushes to indifference and hatred. Our megacities, our cosmopolitan cities are some kind of abscesses, delaying the emergence of larger abscesses. Architecture and town planning, launching ambitious tentacles everywhere, produce monsters alone, not from an aesthetic point of view (alas, alas, this often happens), but in the sense that these monsters testify to the loss of integrity and organ city of the city, its disintegration and Disorganization.
They no longer obey the rhythm of the city, its interrelations, but are superimposed on it as something that has come from the outside, something alien Characteristic (English) approx. Even city ensembles, endowed with symbolic significance (Bobur, Forum, La Défense, La Villet), are only pseudo centers around which a false movement is formed. In fact, they testify to the stylization of urban life. Their external attractiveness seems to be designed to stun the tourist, and their function is similar to the function of a place of universal communication (airport, metro, huge supermarket), a place where people lose their citizenship, citizenship, their territory. However, it is here that all sorts of marginal and representatives of the subculture are moving, wandering in search of devastating ecstasy and finding it in this parasitic formation.
Even when such ensembles are created for cultural purposes, they are transformed not into radiation centers, but into absorption and excretion centers; These are just flow converters, mechanisms with input and output. One gets the impression that these are exhibits that have escaped from the world exhibition, and not a new part of the city; Bobur is one of such monsters, and, embodying the modern utopia of culture, it is an excellent example of the desertification of culture and the city, an example of the irrepressible erosion of the cultural relief, the gradual reduction of sociality to its simplest manifestations. For everything indicates that we are steadily moving towards the in distinction of culture and life, to denying the culture even the distinctive signs of life in the context of the city’s adaptation and its communications to the socialization of the social. Too much capillary diffusion, too much osmotic movement, too many movements, too Many communicating vessels, clutches, interactions.
Too much communication in a devastated space, in a city that has become like the Museum of Ideal Deconstruction. It is massive urbanization that are designed to disguise the process of devastation and desertification, and at the same time they are the brightest evidence of it. In this connection, I would like to mention one significant event, although it happened several years ago; I mean the scavenger strike in Bobur. This strike, undertaken to satisfy several demands of junior staff, quickly turned Beaubourg from a cultural space into a giant landfill. Just at that time in Bobur there was an exhibition devoted to the problem of waste. Needless to say, that Bobur, having become strangers due to strikers in a certain space, littered with garbage, was much superior to this ordinary exhibition in its visibility. Of course, no one dared to call a strike a cultural act or to present strikers as real counterculture figures, and yet they acted in this role, because only they could clearly show in situ. Trans. And in full size, in what condition is the cultural environment of the city.
Urban problems bring us, through the concepts of concentration and desertification, to another concept that, in my opinion, is of primary importance, to the notion of critical mass. This concept, coming from matter and From the sciences of matter, from physics and chemistry, and hence from cosmology, is also applicable in all fields of humanitarian knowledge. The question arises whether a person is really a social being. This cannot be for sure; At least, the social essence of man has its limits. The denser congestion of millions of people in urban areas, their coexistence there Inevitably lead to an exponential increase in violence due to the fact that in conditions of forced promiscuity people are mutually canceled. And this is something that is the opposite of social being, or, conversely, the height of sociality, its extreme manifestation, when it begins to collapse by itself. The appearance of the masses on the horizon of modern history marks an offensive and at the same time a catastrophic collapse of sociality.
This is the crux of the problem of critical mass. We know its solution in cosmology: if the mass of the universe is below a certain threshold, then the universe continues to expand and big bang The Big Bang approx. Lasts indefinitely. If the threshold is surpassed, then implosion begins, the universe shrinks, this is already a big crunch Great compression (Eng.) approx. Our information arteries, the Internet and the creation in the near future, as we are promised, of worldwide communication suggest that we are just crossing that threshold of the globalist of information, its accessibility at any time and in any place that is at risk Automatic compression, sharp reversion, danger of information big crunch. Perhaps we have already crossed this threshold, perhaps a catastrophe is already taking place if the abundance of information supplied by the media is canceled by itself and if the balance expressed in terms of objective information turns out to be in some sense negative (the perverse effect of oversaturation with information). In any case, we have certainly overcome this threshold in the social sphere if we take into account the rapid growth of the population, the expansion of control networks, security agencies, communication and interaction, as well as the spread of extra sociality, leading to the implosion of the real sphere of the social and relevant concept.