Thought is not a matter of accumulation.
It’s no use heating water to 80 degrees for hours.
It won’t come to boil.
All it will ever do is evaporate.

Jean Baudrillard: Cool Memories IV 1995-2000. Chris Turner (tr.) Londres: Verso, 2003.

Algunos de los temas más interesantes de este cuarto volumen de Cool Memories son los siguientes.

En cuestiones políticas Baudrillard insiste en desenmascarar las buenas intenciones de la izquierda.  También dice Žižek que la única oportunidad de supervivencia para la izquierda es ingerir cuanto antes una fuerte dosis de autocrítica, del mismo modo que Edward Norton se libera dándose una paliza brutal frente a su jefe en The Fight Club (Fincher, 1999). El análisis del apoyo de los intelectuales europeos a la revuelta de Chiapas o de la utilidad de los fondos destinados a la ayuda al Tercer Mundo es a un tiempo sarcástico e insuperable:

The ideological exploitation of the victims of poverty is ultimately not so very different from the trade in blood and organs: it’s all part of the Western world’s import-export business. (p. 33)

The tide of funds sweeping into culture, social welfare and the Third World clearly has no other purpose than to mop up the excess of money that is poisoning the Western economies. And those who believe they are doing something for the have-nots with all these programmes – most of which go straight down the drain – are merely taking on this vital function of consumption which the deprived are, in the main, forced to assume, thus becoming its victims. For the same exploited peoples from whom in the past we extracted a surplus now serve (‘into the bargain’) to digest and absorb that surplus. Entire populations are doomed to the contradictory, twofold labour of being despoiled for profit and mobilized like digestive enzymes, like bacteria in septic tanks. (pp. 47-48)

Si la izquierda está herida de muerte también lo está la democracia. Como el escorpión que al verse rodeado por las llamas se inyecta su propio veneno, la democracia al verse envuelta entre las llamas del capital se arroja en brazos de la corrupción. No tiene otra opción que el suicidio.

Just as the scorpion threatened by fire shoots its own venom into itself, democracy encircled by the flames of free-market economics and the new world order pumps the searing venom of corruption into its veins. Thought, too, encircled by this gloomy reality, prefers to commit suicide by swallowing its own concept. (p. 18)

La nuestra es una sociedad de imágenes y la publicidad produce la mayor parte de ellas. Entre los publicistas siempre ha destacado Oliviero Toscani. Sus anuncios consiguen un doble objetivo: divulgar la marca Benetton y llamar la atención sobre lacras sociales como el SIDA o la anorexia.En realidad las buenas intenciones de Toscani (si las tiene) son ridículas. Lo que habría que poner de manifiesto es la crueldad de la publicidad misma, de la moda, del medio. Pero, evidentemente, ¿cómo puede la publicidad desenmascarar las travesuras del capital?

Turning poverty and violence into leitmotivs of advertising, as Toscani does; reincorporating AIDS, sex, war and death into fashion — why not? The advertising vision of happiness is no less obscene. But on one condition: it must show the violence of advertising itself, the violence of fashion, the violence of the medium. Something advertisers are wholly incapable of. Now, the fashionable world itself — the faces of the stars, the underwater dance routines— are a spectacle of death. The world’s woes are just as readable in the figure and face of a model as in the skeletal body of an African. You can read the same cruelty everywhere if you know how to see it. (p. 73)

El arte, en su día propietario exclusivo de las imágenes, de la función crítica y el cambio social, se ha transformado en pieza de museo. Esto significa, explicado en pocas palabras, que al turista no le interesa contemplar la obra de arte sino sólo el haber estado allí. Esto toma tintes patéticos en el caso del arte contemporáneo, enfermo, como las vacas locas, de alimentarse de sus propios residuos pulverizados.

Art dies with inbreeding. This is not unlike the story of mad-cow disease and the animal feeds — live animals being made to eat pulverized dead ones. Art has, in this same way, begun to live off its own pulverized feed, a residue of old forms and of a diligently freeze-dried art history. Most importantly, art has devoured its own idea, or has been devoured by it – an incestuous autophagy, combined with a recycling of its own excrement for internal use. (p. 97)

Cito con frecuencia a Baudrillard porque, como él mismo escribe, citar es un ejercicio de anámnesis. En sus aforismos expresa ideas que me han asaltado previamente de un modo infinitamente mejor de lo que yo podría hacerlo. Esa es la razón de tantos fragmentos suyos en este blog.

I quote only those I admire, because they managed to say what I wanted to say better than I could. Or said what I feel I could have written. It is like your thought being turned out by someone else, who returns it to you as if you had given it to them. The fact that someone could have thought it before you is a shared sign, a predestined sign, like an object which offers itself to the lens. This pleasure of quotation is, then, extremely rare, and should remain so.