Bloggence, Cunning, Exile

Passive-aggressive Thought: hacking passwords of the present

I believe that most of you are hyper enough, having fired up the browser for another jaunt through cyberspace, to catch onto what sort of thinking goes on at this site. But for a Moonday of light reflections, refracted through the intertext of hyperspace, here's somebody else thinking about his sort of thinking:

"I attempt to free myself from a referential, teleological thinking in order to pursue the play of a sort of thinking which is aware that something else thinks it. This is why I have always been quite close to news of current events -- not so much in sociological or political terms, but rather so as to measure the angle of incidence of a parallel world into those events, a world with which a perpetual confrontation is going on.
"Thought must play a catastrophic role, must be itself an element of catastrophe, of provocation, in a world that wants to cleanse everthing absolutely, to exterminate death and negativity. But thought at the same time must remain humanist, concerned for the human, and to that end, recapture the reversibility of good and evil, of the human and inhuman."
---Baudrillard's conclusion to Passwords

A critic has called this "passive-aggressive" thought, but Baudrillard puts his best face on it. OK, so I believe that thought should be a bit more aggressive than passive, but probably not as aggressive as to impose one's faiths onto reality itself. (See for example, DobSon SquarePants below.) The "passive" element is to feel out how things are not like they were yesterday; to open one's imagination to the muse of history in passage to the future. What people find most provocative and aggressive in Baudrillard's work is itself the result of of his oddly passive articulation of the currents, of the "something else" of the parallel world; of symbolic confrontation, ironic reversals, reappropriations; to find the passwords and hack the mainframe. So thanks for stopping by this Moonday. Now go forth leapfrogging into that spun curve-balled cyberspace and do some thinking.

posted by E. Heroux @ 1:31 AM