|
Everywhere
you look
these days it seems you are bound to see Jean
Baudrillard. He is on the face of the alarm clock which
rings to begin your day, and his face with its squeaky clean skin
adorns the box of soap you use to cleanse your face.
General
Mills recently announced the launch of Baudrillard Crunch.
This is a typically American choice. Had the French thought of it
first, it certainly would have been Baudrillard Snaps. The snap
is a clean gesture; immediate and unmistakable. The snap has a precision
that even a Gambian could appreciate, but the American doesn't like
his precision until after breakfast. A 9 AM board meeting should
for the American begin with a snap, but as he dribbles his low-fat
milk upon his synthetic flannel pajamas, he prefers a meal that
goes crunch. Something he can sink his teeth into. To feel before
the 9 AM board meeting that he has already taken a bite out of the
world.
Then
there's the Zhombi by Kia,
a sporty little sedan priced well within the range of those who
like their breakfast to crunch. It is possible I suppose that this
car may have been named for the snuffed-out little beauty queen
from Colorado, but if that were the case it should have been made
as a concept car and stuck in a museum somewhere. A thing dead to
the world, the concept car. But the Zhombi is functional, and like
"Jean B." it can get you from A to B. You may not know
where you are when you arrive, but the important part of driving
there in a Zhombi is that you got there in style.
I could
go on with further examples of the ubiquity of Baudrillard
such as his ability to anchor three separate network news shows
simultaneously or his facility for being both the pitch man for
condoms and the browbeating voice that encourages youngsters to
abstinence on Sundays. This fellow Baudrillard has absolutely no
scruples about being all things to all people and simultaneously
having absolutely no substance which one can ascribe to him definitively.
The man is a thixotropic
substance; a slime oozing from the very pores of everything to which
he sets his deductive powers. Like his distant cousin, Savoir Faire,
Baudrillard, a cartoon himself, "is everywhere." And because
he is everywhere, he can be, in the end, nothing, and nowhere. Baudrillard's
presence renders whatever he approaches a simulacra of itself, by
the same method a ray of sunshine renders whatever it touches to
be light.
I, on
the other hand, will never be Jean Baudrillard. I do not adorn any
product, or even set my mind to analyzing any of the spaces I inhabit.
Instead when I park myself somewhere and settle upon some deportment
and a countenance which illustrates it, I do so with my full intention
and presence, which absolutely destroys any possibility of simulacra.
I allow myself to be defined, and in so doing I deflect the possibility
of a multiplicity of meanings. With no multiplicity of meanings
there is nothing which can be devoid of meaning. What is not devoid
of meaning intrinsically can not be or become Jean Baudrillard.
Try as I might to be the post-modern phenom, to be the poster boy
for slick packaging and media savvy, I have become an utter failure
at being empty of semiotic valuations. Even my nom de plume has
been exposed before ever I set pen to paper. Affixed to the world
for all to see like a butterfly in a lepidopterist's display case
or a man-God hybrid grounded by his Father forever.
Christ
may be able to be Jean Baudrillard. He is the King of the Multiplicity
of Meanings. (He? Which?) I, However, harbor no ambiguities of this
sort, and that is why I will never be Jean Baudrillard.
About
the Author: Mitchell Missouri is not Jean Baudrillard
|
|
|
