cool memories

March 6, 2007 12:52 PM

Le sociologue et philosopheJean Baudrillard, mort mardi à Paris à l'âge de 77 ans.
posted by shoepal (65 comments total)

. <- simulacrum
posted by adamgreenfield at 12:55 PM on March 6, 2007 [1 favorite]

Baudrillard never happened.
posted by klangklangston at 12:58 PM on March 6, 2007 [3 favorites]

not a big fan. sorry to hear he passed.
posted by phaedon at 1:00 PM on March 6, 2007

o
posted by farishta at 1:02 PM on March 6, 2007

le dot
posted by Astro Zombie at 1:06 PM on March 6, 2007 [1 favorite]

Forget Baudrillard.
posted by googly at 1:08 PM on March 6, 2007

Early Baudrillard was some of my favourite philosophical writing from that time. Not sure how it reads today; I'll have to dig up some of his early tracts and go through them again.
posted by carter at 1:09 PM on March 6, 2007

quelle dommage.
posted by YoBananaBoy at 1:13 PM on March 6, 2007

"Gambling MetaFilter itself is a desert form, inhuman, uncultured, initiatory, a challenge to the natural economy of value, a crazed activity on the fringes of exchange. But it too has a strict limit and stops abruptly; its boundaries are exact, its passion knows no confusion. Neither the desertinternet nor gambling are open areas; their spaces are finite and concentric, increasing in intensity toward the interior, toward a central point, be it the spirit of gambling MetaFilter or the heart of the desert internet - a privileged, immemorial space, where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme rarity of traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the instantaneity of [intellectual] wealth."

oh, and

.
posted by exlotuseater at 1:14 PM on March 6, 2007

.
posted by flippant at 1:23 PM on March 6, 2007

. <- totally sincere, although Baudrillard would disagree
posted by LMGM at 1:29 PM on March 6, 2007

. .
posted by OmieWise at 1:34 PM on March 6, 2007

From the International Herald Tribune (and not your fault shoepal):

Born in June 20, 1979, in Reims, west of Paris, Baudrillard, the son of civil servants, began a long teaching career instructing high school students in German. After receiving a doctorate in sociology, he taught at the University of Paris in Nanterre.

So, he was only 27? He died too young.

.

(way to proof, IHT)
posted by beelzbubba at 1:38 PM on March 6, 2007

JB on 9/11: "This is not a clash of civilisations or religions, and it reaches far beyond Islam and America, on which efforts are being made to focus the conflict in order to create the delusion of a visible confrontation and a solution based upon force. There is indeed a fundamental antagonism here, but one that points past the spectre of America (which is perhaps the epicentre, but in no sense the sole embodiment, of globalisation) and the spectre of Islam (which is not the embodiment of terrorism either) to triumphant globalisation battling against itself."
posted by docgonzo at 1:40 PM on March 6, 2007

.
posted by treepour at 1:56 PM on March 6, 2007

.
posted by kkokkodalk at 1:56 PM on March 6, 2007

.
posted by juv3nal at 2:00 PM on March 6, 2007

.
posted by muckster at 2:05 PM on March 6, 2007

.
posted by Schlimmbesserung at 2:07 PM on March 6, 2007

(en francais)
posted by shoepal at 2:07 PM on March 6, 2007

Vive la France !
posted by elpapacito at 2:13 PM on March 6, 2007

;
posted by Rumple at 2:15 PM on March 6, 2007 [1 favorite]

If Guy deBord was still alive, I'd be tempted to say it was a hit. Can't say I think much of Baudrillard but

.
posted by Football Bat at 2:19 PM on March 6, 2007

[dot]
posted by jokeefe at 2:22 PM on March 6, 2007

It was only a biological death, not a symbolic one.
posted by vacapinta at 2:35 PM on March 6, 2007

I'm new to this, so please help this neophyte bagel find his way in the "desert of the real".

From wikipedia:
Baudrillard claims that our society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that in fact all that we know as real is actually a simulation of reality.

If I see a tree outside, the tree is there and I can walk up to it and touch it. Why isn't that tree real, according to B? Or is he saying that when I think of a tree my conception of a tree is a product of images and symbols of trees but not by trees themselves?

If the latter, wouldn't this have been worse in the past, when the simulacra of things were inferior representations of the actual things than the representations we have now?
posted by Pastabagel at 2:42 PM on March 6, 2007

Welcome to the desert of the real.

< voice agent smith> "Goodbye, Mr. Baudrillard." < / voice>

.
posted by allaboutgeorge at 2:43 PM on March 6, 2007 [2 favorites]

Things do not happen if they are not seen to happen.

So why did you post this?

.
posted by nervousfritz at 2:49 PM on March 6, 2007

A Reality of Simulation
posted by timsteil at 2:54 PM on March 6, 2007

Le point.
posted by greycap at 2:55 PM on March 6, 2007

While postmodernism was a (mostly detestable) fad and there's much I find overly difficult, abstruse, and overwrought in his work...occasionally there were lightning bolts of insight.

.
posted by inoculatedcities at 3:47 PM on March 6, 2007

La non-guerre, elle, inaugure l'inquiétante familiarité de la terreur.
posted by matteo at 3:54 PM on March 6, 2007

Eventually, we all must face the mirror of production.

So long to a strange but interesting dude.

.
posted by fourcheesemac at 4:00 PM on March 6, 2007

"These trips are completely imaginary. It's a hallucination, not an experience. Can a dream be a meaningful experience? How about a thought?"
posted by snailer at 4:06 PM on March 6, 2007 [1 favorite]

It's fashionable to detest Baudrillard, but his cool memories are a needed tonic in an age of fundamentalism.

"Nothing can be greater than seduction itself, not even the order that destroys it."

Carry on, JB.
posted by washburn at 4:30 PM on March 6, 2007

Tel un coup. Une telle philosophe.
posted by everichon at 4:32 PM on March 6, 2007

If I see a tree outside, the tree is there and I can walk up to it and touch it. Why isn't that tree real, according to B?

I'll give this a try . . .

First, as a theorist, he's primarily concerned mainly with culture, meaning, the production of meaning, the realm of symbols and signs, etc. So, with that in mind . . .

Consider reality TV. Everything is being played out for the camera and audience. We all know that nothing is happening the way it really would if no cameras were present.

Similarly, what we call "real life" is also being played out on various stages, for various audiences. We play slightly (or sometimes radically) different "characters" depending on social context -- my friends know one side of me, my coworkers another, my family another. Furthermore, our possessions and appearance act kind of like props on a stage, framing the way others experience or perceive us.
posted by treepour at 4:33 PM on March 6, 2007

metafilter: the ecstasy communication

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posted by christopher.taylor at 5:20 PM on March 6, 2007

/
posted by UbuRoivas at 5:25 PM on March 6, 2007

@
posted by dejah420 at 5:31 PM on March 6, 2007

my friends know one side of me, my coworkers another, my family another. Furthermore, our possessions and appearance act kind of like props on a stage, framing the way others experience or perceive us.
posted by treepour at 7:33 PM EST on March 6

But hasn't it always been this way? And upon further reading, is he really speaking about society in the age of television?
posted by Pastabagel at 5:46 PM on March 6, 2007

"Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void. "

I would so mash that, Monsieur B.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 5:55 PM on March 6, 2007

If I see a tree outside, the tree is there and I can walk up to it and touch it. Why isn't that tree real,

I don't think Baudrillard questions that you can walk up and touch the object - yes there's a real object there. On the other hand it's likely that the tree you have growing outside your house is there as a mnemonic of the idea of nature - despite being a very long long way from being "natural". Just think for a second why you chose to use a tree as an example of something real that you could go outside and touch - i assume because for you it's the epitome of something real, solid and natural. The tree is more than a plant that happens to grow outside - for you it's become symbolic of the "real". This is the world of simulation that Baudrillard is talking about, because although the tree might be a real plant living outside your house it's a plant that's likely to be only living there because it was deliberately planted there and kept alive in order to give you that sense of reality and nature. The tree has been in a sense written.

Trees and Gardens are actually a good place to start when thinking about simulation - the classic garden is a simulacra of nature as it should be without all the nasty messy bits. They're often a particularly barren and sterile idea of nature - and without their human life support system would collapse very quickly. But the garden/park/nature reserve has become more natural than nature itself. That bit of wasteland at the end of your road full of weeds and rats and rotting garbage seems a pale shadow of the blossoming hyper-reality of the garden, doesn't it.

does that help at all ?
posted by silence at 6:21 PM on March 6, 2007 [7 favorites]

.

Great links, guys. Thanks.
posted by bru at 6:28 PM on March 6, 2007

8253
posted by prettyboyfloyd at 6:35 PM on March 6, 2007

That's supposed to say interrobang. Anyway, M. Baudrillard, me and the rest of my comp lit class we hardly knew ye.
posted by prettyboyfloyd at 6:36 PM on March 6, 2007

From allaboutgeorge's link: "The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce."
posted by shoepal at 6:43 PM on March 6, 2007

Nuts.
posted by Pseudoephedrine at 7:47 PM on March 6, 2007

Merde!
posted by ZenMasterThis at 8:13 PM on March 6, 2007

treepour: "my friends know one side of me, my coworkers another . . ."

Pastabagel: But hasn't it always been this way? And upon further reading, is he really speaking about society in the age of television?

Well, maybe it was too facile of an example -- I was basically just trying to give a sense of how what he's talking about might not be nutty as it sounds.

On the other hand . . . yes, it has always been this way to some degree, but I think maybe he'd argue that mass media has accelerated this tendency to such a degree that we've passed a crucial threshold, beyond which even what we consider authentic and original is just a copy (or a story on a stage).

Put another way (and I feel I'm really going out on a limb here), prior to our contemporary age, culture was still being invented. That is, the stage (and all the smaller stages within it) were still being built. Culture wasn't consumed so much as it was enacted, created, improvised. When you're creating something anew, you're engaged with it in such a way that there really is no clear distinction between you and what you're creating. That's originality, authenticity. In such a moment, you're not an audience and what you're creating isn't a spectacle that you stand aside and observe. With the advent of mass media and the so-called "end of history," however, we stopped creating our world anew. We became our own permanent audience, and our lives, our world, became the spectacle. Culture is no longer being created, but merely endlessly dissembled, reflected, refracted, recycled. The copy has supplanted the original.
posted by treepour at 8:21 PM on March 6, 2007

freebird!
posted by Wash Jones at 8:35 PM on March 6, 2007

le dot - now that's cute. Sad to hear of his passing though... some very provocative words from him.
posted by rmm at 10:21 PM on March 6, 2007

I remember first reading him. Wild stuff. Later, I discovered he was putting into over-wrought French what Borges had already put into plain Spanish and English.
posted by anotherbrick at 10:47 PM on March 6, 2007

No there there.
posted by Wolof at 11:14 PM on March 6, 2007

.
posted by amberglow at 4:07 AM on March 7, 2007

.
posted by Eirixon at 5:23 AM on March 7, 2007

Guardian:
Jean Baudrillard's death did not take place.... "What would you like to be said about you? In other words, who are you?" Baudrillard replied: "What I am, I don't know. I am the simulacrum of myself." ...
posted by amberglow at 6:54 AM on March 7, 2007

and from there: ...the attacks on the US of September 11 2001. Baudrillard called it "the ultimate event, the mother of all events".

"It is the terrorist model," he wrote, "to bring about an excess of reality, and have the system collapse beneath that excess."

Subsequently, for Baudrillard, there was no longer any need for the media to virtualise events, as in the first Gulf war, since the war's participants had thoroughly internalised the rules of simulation. His 2004 essay, War Porn, observed how the photographs from Abu Ghraib enacted scenes of fetishistic pornography, concluding: "It is really America that has electrocuted itself." ...
posted by amberglow at 6:55 AM on March 7, 2007

He really was the perfect philosopher for this administration, with their "we make our own reality" and "you in the reality-based community" shit.
posted by amberglow at 7:00 AM on March 7, 2007

Thanks for that guardian article, amberglow.
posted by shoepal at 7:30 AM on March 7, 2007

silence -

Awesome. I did not pick the tree by accident, I picked it deliberately because it is a thing which grows without human intervention - you don't water trees or feed them.

So continuing with the example of gardens vs. nature, can we agree then that tree nature is found in the places not shaped by deliberate human intent - for example the wilderness of yellowstone or the amazon.

What would B (or students of his philosophy) say to the fact that nature cannot be experienced, even in these natural environments, because we bring our attendant technologies there with us, and as those technologies improve, we become removed from nature even if we are physically present within it. In reading some of his stuff, I came across some mention of the fact that our world is written to be risk free. For example if you take GPS into the amazon, are you really in the Amazon, or are you defining where you are with reference to the coordinates. Is GPS/ google earth giving you the experience of Borges map?
posted by Pastabagel at 7:40 AM on March 7, 2007

Bon Voyage monsieur. You will be greatly missed by me.

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posted by Dantien at 7:49 AM on March 7, 2007

What would B (or students of his philosophy) say to the fact that nature cannot be experienced, even in these natural environments, because we bring our attendant technologies there with us, and as those technologies improve, we become removed from nature even if we are physically present within it.

While B might agree with this, I understand his point to be more about what we bring with us in the sense of acculturated notions/ideas about trees/nature than it is about bringing with us any physical artifact of technology. For instance, you see a tree that you've never seen before and you compare it to trees you have seen before. Are the trees you're comparing it to in your head mostly "actual" trees, or are they mostly constructed: either in the earlier discussed context of gardens or parks, or as depictions of trees in photographs/television, etc.
posted by juv3nal at 2:55 PM on March 7, 2007

I enjoyed his ideas but my main problem with him, like Hegel, is that his language and prose was so far removed from being intelligible that it bordered on bullshit. I am not against complexity (and granted I did not read him in original French, though I doubt it is much better), but he is a prime example of how not to do post-modernism. My god, Wittgenstein and Popper looked like Hemingway next to him. The problem is not itself the wording and that whole left bank intellectualism, but that it is so esoteric that it lends itself to easy misinterpretation, even for the scholarly reader.

That and I have to hide his books because of The Matrix. I thought about putting scotch tape of Simulacra and Simulation, but putting it amongst my Romantic-era poets was enough to keep people from casually finding it and making reference to Neo.

Pastabagel: I would recommend just reading Baulliard as his ideas and concepts are more nuanced than what can be explained in a few comments (and thus lead to the misinterpretation, or shallow interpretation I just talked about).
posted by geoff. at 3:05 PM on March 7, 2007

It's fashionable to detest Baudrillard, but his cool memories are a needed tonic in an age of fundamentalism.

He wrote 50 books, and was enough of a cultural force that whiny graduate students now feel compelled to posture in opposition to his simulacrum. I doubt anyone posting in this thread will ever top that, myself included.
posted by mecran01 at 7:30 PM on March 7, 2007