Recuperation as a figure of postmodernity: Testing the uses of Baudrillard's cultural theory.

摘要

The complex means of achieving consensual support for a hegemonic system is that I refer to loosely as the process of recuperation. This study provides a further understanding of how the systemic momentum of the current corporate/state/security complex generates a diffuse but powerful nexus of cultural influence through its manipulation of media and public information. My secondary but equally prominent concern is with the attempt of French theorist Jean Baudrillard to develop a theory of contemporary culture that can match these new forms of abstract cultural power, provide an appropriate map of its contours and its ruses, and possibly divert it from its ends before it diverts the efforts of theory from its own. A third concern is with the possibilities for subjective resistance to the current mode of socialization as it is currently achieved by, through, and for late-capitalist marketing practices and commercial values: promotionalism, simulation, nostalgia, etc.;Poststructuralist controversies over the "End of the Social" and the "Death of the Individual Subject" have helped to expose the tenuous fate of oppositional agency and the means by which late-capitalist culture develops functional and systemic methods of pacification or elimination of social discontent, artistic dissent, critical opposition, and political resistance. I contend that the practices of co-optation, deterrence, dissuasion, discreditation, covert action, disinformation, and plausible deniability now often succeed earlier forms of ideological persuasion or overt suppression and together belong to the generic category of recuperation. A concurrent development in the United States has been an increasingly less-camouflaged and sometimes demonstrative retrieval of archaic violence by agencies of the State and the military. Such calculated and /or hysterical behavior may partially attempt to recover lost referents of the "Real," or grounding forms of meaning and power, both personal and institutional, eroded and absorbed by the "flight into simulation." What has been left out of these equations by nearly all postmodern theorists, Baudrillard included, are the cumulative and ironic effects of the deliberate destabilization of the public's sense of the "Real" by intelligence and other government of military agencies and their practices of covert operations. It is therefore appropriate to address the concerns of so-called "conspiracy theory" with uncovering covert operations as a neglected area which represents the virtual "blindspot" of postmodern theory.