Comments on: Missing Link

By: Nicholas Gruen

Nicholas Gruen — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 04:33:20 +0000

Thanks Harry – you’re certainly right – it takes a lot of time. Wanna do one some time?

By: harry clarke

harry clarke — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 09:24:17 +0000

Nicholas and Club Troppo generally, Thanks for providing the Missing Link service. It is a service. Unknown blogs can get better known and surveying the posts cited reveals good posts that would have otherwise been missed. It is a lot of work so thanks.

By: Mark Bahnisch

Mark Bahnisch — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 09:00:41 +0000

I’d agree, Chris. And thanks for pointing to the work of Merrin, which I wasn’t aware of, and I’ll follow up next week in the uni library. It’s interesting to observe (and I’d have to a bit of hunting to find the reference) that Baudrillard’s essay was set on the syllabus of DoD universities in the States – tbe strategy wonks in the defence intelligentsia thought he was on to something with his analysis!

By: cs

cs — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 08:05:33 +0000

Thanks Mark. Allow me to also agree with your implicit support for his theorizing of the “non-event”, a long and fruitful stream of thought in which the Gulf War essay is merely the most well known – and which, for my money, is perhaps his most useful contribution to the practical world of analysis and politics.

By: Mark Bahnisch

Mark Bahnisch — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 07:59:58 +0000

Yes, that’s what I meant. I was responding to the people on the other thread who claimed he was.

By: cs

cs — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 07:51:23 +0000

elided with postmodernists

elided? Huh? I assume you simply mean he wasn’t a postmodernist, which he wasn’t of course.

By: Nicholas Gruen

Nicholas Gruen — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 06:09:45 +0000

Thx Mark – fixed

By: Mark Bahnisch

Mark Bahnisch — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 05:41:17 +0000

Nicholas, I think that you’re missing a link in the para on Baudrillard – Jason’s post is not hyperlinked:

http://catallaxyfiles.com/?p=2634

I don’t particularly want to get into a debate about him, because as I think Chris has also perceived, it’s difficult to refute claims that the legacy of a complex thinker is all worthless or something when those making the claims pick up on only quotes or small aspects of that thought, but I would observe that he could be placed with Bourdieu much more in a sociological tradition (as Chris notes, his legacy to Durkheim is an important clue) than elided with postmodernists like Lyotard. I find Baudrillard’s earlier work on consumption and political economy quite valuable, and there’s a lot of commonality with Bourdieu’s approach (not least a much stronger empirical streak than French philosophers have). “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place” is an important piece for understanding the mediation of war, and its obvious referent is Merleau-Ponty’s “The War Has Taken Place”, published in the 40s. Here, as often, there’s a reference to a French intellectual tradition which doesn’t make obvious sense to those not familiar with a whole oeuvre, and thus lends itself (most unfortunately) to misinterpretation and denigration.

But enough said.

By: Nicholas Gruen

Nicholas Gruen — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 04:24:24 +0000

Sorry Captain Wacky and thanks for picking up the problems. It was late, late at night with the website playing up. The spelling errors have been corrected if that was your concern with the first two examples. Not sure what the problem with the third example is. If you want more on what’s in the piece, well it’s the usual psephological stuff on what’s going on like I said – Labor, Libs, satisfaction, best PM – with time series. It interests me about as much as the racing guide, but it was the most substantial such article around I could find and has the goods for those who pour over this stuff.

Would you like to have a crack at ML yourself?

By: cs

cs — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 02:53:52 +0000

I don’t know why those who dig him cannot just dig him, and everyone else can make their own arrangements. To his fans, it is the very stylistics that you complain of that make him fun, as well as stimulating and challenging. It is as if you were to ask Bob Dylan to sing like Billy Joel, so as we don’t have to make any effort to appreciate the lyrics. It is, I think, to suppose some orthodox standard by which an author must comply or be damned, automatically excluding every author who would refuse the existence of this standard, or at least oppose its assumption, such as Baudrillard. The objection to his style of writing is, perhaps, akin to appealing to the lounge room standards of a middle class television audience, watching, perhaps, Big Brother … or blogging.

By: Link

Link — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 00:46:55 +0000

cs I have a lot of trouble getting my head around Baudrillard and grasped a concept of his long enough to nut out a performance piece based on simulcra and hyperreality. Reading Baudrillard is maybe a bit like reading Shakespeare you have to be in the ‘groove’ for a while. My knee-jerk reaction to much of the theoretical stuff I had to read at artschool was to get angry with it because I could not understand it, even when I read each word very slowly. Every sentence sometimes so jampacked with large abstract concepts that when they’re all strung together it becomes overwhelming and almost incomprehensible.

I read the article you put up, it was v. good and I appreciated it. I still think that for those lesser than JB, writing in a style that seems mainly to obfuscate a point and mark the writer out with pretentions to an intellectual elite, should be strongly railed against.

By: James Farrell

James Farrell — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 21:07:00 +0000

Yes, that Peter Black sure is a dynamo. Makes me sick, actually. I bet he’s no good at cooking.

Well done again, Nicholas, last of the Missing Link auteurs. Now it’s the Borg’s turn.

By: Captain Wacky

Captain Wacky — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 18:24:47 +0000

Christ, Nicholas, put some effort in. Kim Beasely? “Kieran from The Dead Roo fills us in on the Green

By: cs

cs — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 15:13:03 +0000

but not leaving many of us much the wiser as to why.

For the life of me, I cannot understand this. I’m not complaining about you in particular, Nicholas, for it is a more general blog-myopia. I linked my short tribute to Baudrillard to a scholarly paper that I repeatedly stated can be taken as broadly in accordance with my views. What is so wierd about this that so few readers appear willing or able to comprehend such simple advice? I mean, like, I gave you an entire paper, from an international scholar who specialises in the guy, with full references, and an appended bibliography, with net links, that I endorsed. What more can anyone who actually might wish to be even a tiny little weenie bit wiser as to why I might think he was an intellectual superstar can anyone possibly, conceivably, like in the whole world, want?