The vanishing point is a concept I would like to hear more about though. Baudrillard talks about original concepts, essences, vanishing when it seems like they are altered from their natural state. But that doesn’t sound right, I have to have read this wrong. It seems obvious to me that an essence moving along a linear timeline would be constantly moving, and constantly adapting its essence in time; there is no original except that which is. Unless you are willing to posit a necessarily existent being at the beginning of all essences, don’t you have to admit an ever-evolving non-history? Maybe that is what Baudrillard meant by the Christian need to anticipate the end?
Sunday, October 15, 2006
“Of all the gin joints in all the world…”
Of course I would miss the last class based on our readings, and of course that class would be the one to tie everything together. It’s perfect. After all, I find if you make things harder on yourself, life is always interesting. Then again, according to Baudrillard, nothing really matters in the end of things anyway. Everything is a simulation, any attempt to attend to that simulation in ‘real time’ merely leaves you without meaning or purpose, and without meaning the future becomes unimportant and the concept of the past becomes incoherent.
The vanishing point is a concept I would like to hear more about though. Baudrillard talks about original concepts, essences, vanishing when it seems like they are altered from their natural state. But that doesn’t sound right, I have to have read this wrong. It seems obvious to me that an essence moving along a linear timeline would be constantly moving, and constantly adapting its essence in time; there is no original except that which is. Unless you are willing to posit a necessarily existent being at the beginning of all essences, don’t you have to admit an ever-evolving non-history? Maybe that is what Baudrillard meant by the Christian need to anticipate the end?
The vanishing point is a concept I would like to hear more about though. Baudrillard talks about original concepts, essences, vanishing when it seems like they are altered from their natural state. But that doesn’t sound right, I have to have read this wrong. It seems obvious to me that an essence moving along a linear timeline would be constantly moving, and constantly adapting its essence in time; there is no original except that which is. Unless you are willing to posit a necessarily existent being at the beginning of all essences, don’t you have to admit an ever-evolving non-history? Maybe that is what Baudrillard meant by the Christian need to anticipate the end?
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I am also intrigued by this concept of the vanishing point of history. Implicit in the very idea of a vanishing point is the assumption that there is something to vanish, that there is or was an essential thing called history that no longer exists. Baudrillard defines history as "a succession of non-meaningless facts, each engendering the other by cause and effect, but doing so without any absolute necessity and all standing open to the future, unevenly poised." But history cannot exist without individuals recording it, right? I guess what I'm asking is, is history like the proverbial tree in the forest? If shit happens and no one writes it down, how do we know it happened? In this case, is it even history? If what truly defines something as history is our perception and recording of it, then Baudrillard’s definition no longer fits. More importantly, even if history is “a succession of non-meaningless facts”, those facts are totally meaningless in the conscious human experience until we perceive and act on them. Further, they only gain meaning by way of our subjectively interpreting them. So if history is just an ever-evolving mode of human perception of events, then Baudrillard’s vanishing history is simply the changing of the way in which we perceive and record events. If history is what we say it is, or if history only exists in how we record it, or if history is only meaningful once we interpret it, then there was nothing there to vanish in the first place. As you said, there is no original "history"; it is what it is and nothing more.
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