“The Mind's narcissism,” notes Debray, in the course of a stinging critique of the sign-scavenging Semiotic method (demonstrated by Baudrillard) “is the corporate penchant of intellectuals.1”
“A tempting dream, this: to produce the metalanguage of all languages, and re-beget every event by producing its law of begetting. The world is garbled speech, but I who know its codes shall give ti back transparence. The “meta-level” becomes the one transforms into “objects,” and thus into lower-stage, all the other levels.” In the course of critiquing the consumerist conversion of all bodies to signs, Baudrillard is... converting all bodies to signs.
Whoever accedes to it is transformed into a cultural Grand Subject. Since this novel, this thriller, this poem declines (as one possible version among many others) into a generative model whose keys I possess, I become its master at a critical distance, at the very least its equal in inventiveness. The encoding on all fronts of the manifestations of human genius – with the translations and passings it authorized from one to the other – places the Decode at the upper reaches of the sources of meaning and makes him into the author of authors, a creator to the second power. To “semioticize” a text, a film, a commercial poster, a program is in some sense to turn them into satellites. The critic turns sunlike, pulling works and products one by one from his deconstructable disourse as if out of a hat containing a thousand secrets.2
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