I'm pleased, really pleased, about what just happened.
It's not particularly in my nature to want to go letting anyone off the
hook, and that surely includes scientists although most of those that I know
are ethical in thought word and deed to an extent that makes me feel
decidedly tarnished and sloppy. Responsibilities are difficult to define
when it's a question of the making the unknown known, because if you could
get an ethical outline of the Thing you would already have discovered it to
a considerable extent. On the other hand, there is so much dirty business
about, one's responsibilities to the already largely known ought to be
enough to be getting on with. Punch cartoon, 1970-something, pipe-chewing
father to son: "Integrity isn't everything, son - I say *take* the job with
the napalm people". Or one might choose not to take the job with the napalm
people. Sometimes it is clearer than that and sometimes less clear, but yes
there are choices to be made.
The comedy in Baudrillard is in the perversion of language, which includes
scientific language. Scientific terminology is not only being used
*analogically* but also *paralogically*, in a way that elicits a sense of
familiarity and a sense of absurdity at the same time. I know enough about
fractals to find B.'s analogies with fractal geometry warm and familiar, to
feel that I know what he is getting at when he compares something like the
contours of an "event" to the perimeter of a Koch flake. At the same time,
these are ludic, delusional usages, broken and disfunctional theorems - they
don't finally find a "fit" anywhere, which is why the insider who knows what
fits and what doesn't feels compelled to smirk. I believe this is a question
of strategy, rather than just the conceited ineptitude of a continental
poseur. Baudrillard in person is rather modestly and charmingly clever and
the last smirk is certainly is.
Dominic
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