SARGASSO


 It seems to us that truth, lodged in our most
 secret nature, "demands" only to surface.
 (Michel Foucault 1980: 60)

 Contemporary thinkers like Barthes, Baudrillard,
and Foucault have seriously questioned the idea, long
prevalent in Western culture, that confession "frees,"
that to write or to speak is a kind of liberating
activity. Confession is thought in our society to have
a therapeutic aspect as well. If we will only admit
our sins, we will be forgiven. And if we talk enough,
we will eventually arrive at the meaning behind the
meaning, that is, at the "true" meaning and we will be
cured. All of psychoanalytic practice is based on this
premise.

 Thus, today, everything is divulged, even the
insides of buildings (the Centre Georges Pompidou in
Paris is a good example--indeed, Baudrillard has
published an essay on just that subject). Everything that
used to be interiorized, in people and objects, is now
to be found on the exterior, leaving us to wonder,
perhaps, if there is anything at all left on the inside
anymore. Social critics and philosophers alike allude
to a fact explosion, an information explosion which is
only matched by a concurrent explosion of discourse.
Our present-day compulsion to reveal everything coupled
with the rise of the personage of the "expert" has
resulted in what Clifford Geertz calls a rage to invent.
Consequently, says Geertz, we continue to produce words
and documents everywhere, in the form of public opinion
polls, intelligence testing, SAT scores, lie detecting,
electronic bugging, and the like. We will, he adds
wryly, acknowledge depositions from "anyone capable of
talking into a tape recorder" (Geertz 1983: 171).

 The characteristic hysteria of our time, agrees
Baudrillard, is exactly this hysteria of production
and overproduction (of the real and of signs). All that
was previously hidden is reduced to speech and fact--all
the secrets of the body, all the secrets of language--
no longer just everything we wanted to know but surely
much more than we ever hoped to know. The real keeps.
getting bigger and bigger, says Baudrillard, there is
more and more meaning, a cancerous proliferation of