baudrillard dies
ariel_calmer
3,762 Posts
Very sad.
ariel_calmer
3,762 Posts
Comments
Baudrillard (1929-[2007]) - a philospher, cultural critic and media theorist - has famously argued that we increasingly live in a world of simulation. As sociologist Mark Smith puts it: 'Baudrillard argues that it is no longer possible to distinguish between representation and reality in a conventional way, one which assume that representation refers to something which already exists. For Baudillard, all kinds of representations are just 'simulations' of the meanings which have been produced before. This condition, which he describes as hyper-reality involves the blurring of the destinction betwee.. 'fact' and 'fiction'. In hyper-reality meaning is not produced but reproduced through simulations, and simulations and so on.
...Baudrillard argues, people's experience of reality is increasingly indirect and mediated. Television, video games, movies, theme parks and the like are, for Buadrillard, the 'reality' that more and more people inhabit on a daily basis. In his later writings, Baudrillard has been preoccupied with how gatekeepers of knowledge (like CNN & the BBC) mediate the experience of the world for society as a whole. For instance, his ironically titled, "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place" (1995) argued that the Gulf War experienced by citizes of the allied-forces countries was a media construct. This media war, Baudrillard argued, drew upon a well-established repertoire of representations of Arabs which meant that 'representations of reality preceded that reality and thus ceased to be representations and became simulations instead.'...
If no media reported Baudrillard's death, according to him, perhaps he'd still be alive?
who have wrought untold havoc on the world. words have no meaning? everything is perpetually superficial? there is no author behind a text?
these ideas are interesting mental excericises in themselves and for that Baudrialliard et al should be commended for their contributions; but seriously, who really belives that stuff?
in lay language.
i don't think it's possible.
sorry.
if you can more power to you, never seen an explanation i could understand.
to me that means it does not have much value.
quantum physics is complicated as well but you can generally explain theories...or you can explain what it is talking about it ways that an average person could understand.
deconstructionism, and post modernism to a smaller extent, i believe are nonsense.
but anyway
RIP.
Alas ... his death is not just real. It is hyperreal.
batched molecule and shit
I think that I'll agree with ODubs sentiment here. I would also like to throw out the essay/book 'America' that he did in the late 80's(?) as an enjoyable read for a lay person - I found his descriptions of a few cities in that text quite apropos.
Herein lies the fallacy of this type of thinking.
maybe not, as long a copy of his image is made, and then another copy of that and then posted on the internets. he will live forever.
Wouldn't most people recognize the images as a mere representation of his living embodiment?
aren't we all mere representations?
If you're genuinely interested in obtaining a layperson's understanding of deconstruction, I suggest Nicholas Royle's book on Derrida in the Routledge Critical Thinkers series. It's a short book, and not difficult.
Therefore, to us Baudrillard is as alive now as he ever was.
in one way, deconstruction attempts to weaken or, at least, complicate binary oppositions, suggesting instead that there is a greater amount of play and exchange between what would otherwise be considered to be complete opposites. that is, rather than view the world in a manichean or dualisitc way - good/evil, right/wrong, east/west, light/dark, army/terrorists, etc - deconstruction effectively aims to deconstruct these supposedly natural dualisms that have reigned over western thought almost foreva, showing them instead to be rather tenuous constructions in themselves.
does this help?
One of the most important tenets, if you want to call it that, in Deconstruction is that in language there are only differences; though the word difference generally implies "positive terms" between which a difference is set up, language only has differences WITHOUT positive terms. This linguistic model is then extended to apply to any system you choose, from the hommies to substance, event etc. This ideological basis prompted Derrida to coin the clusterfuck of "Differance" and all of the words he amde up to go along with it (differing, deffering, deferance, umm a bunch more i can't remember)
To simplify - once you acknowledge that what seems to be an event (whatever that may be) is really just a construct of a linguistic system, then you are in a position to undo said construct - better yet, to recognize the construct you have already dismantled the construct. Deconstruction is the application of this implication, if that makes sense. For instance, Freud deconstructed the hierarchy of adult-child, Picasso deconstructed the artistic hierarchy of perspective and orientation in his paintings. I would argue that hip hop and sample based music in it's very nature is desconstruction.
Deconstruction as a literary movement becomes a giant academia circle jerk when deconstructionist critics start deconstructing criticism and literary theory by previous critics. Blehh. Deconstruction theory is not nonsense, as it is a theory which can be applied to any system, it is your choice and it does provide a valid interpretation of any system. I could do a 5 pager on deconstruction movements in rap music for sure.
Saussure died almost a century ago. If by Burke you mean Kenneth, he also had nothing to do with deconstruction...
This is one of the more common misunderstandings about deconstruction -that it is merely a synonym for "criticism" or "close reading" or "analysis". If that were true, deconstruction would not have come under attack from so many quarters. Conservatives, philosophers of many different stripes and persuasions, scientists like Alan Sokal, leftist political theorists convinced it promotes an apolitical relativism, et al, spent the 80s and 90s pouring out hundreds of books attacking Derrida and his followers...
Maybe we could apply this to bootlegging/downloading to make it RR? Or could someone deconstruct Microwave?
The long and short of it is that deconstructionism and postmodernism seem more complicated than they really are because:
1)
2) Part of that meant that this burgeoning academic cottage industry in critical theory relied on increasingly obtuse and arcane language/vocabulary that gained currency amongst its adherents (as well as panicked grad students who helped ensure that the next generation of scholars would help perpetuate its use) but it made it far harder for other folks - even other, often older scholars, let alone "lay people" to understand what the fuck they were talking about.
To some degree, I think the latter is understandable - new ideas require new language and any field of study - whether it's literary theory or breakz talk - is going to have its own internal nomenclature. The problem - for me at least - is that there's a fine line between necessary, new vocabulary and the aforementioned "circle jerk" mentality, especially in cases where people are writing/speaking almost entirely out of a new lexicon (no dragons).
So believe me - I'm very, very sympathetic to people's frustrations with the language of critical theory as well as the vogueness of critical theory within academic trends where you basically have studying-theory-for-the-sake-of-theory.
That said, I find that most people's objection to critical theory (which would include postmodernism, post-structuralism, deconstructionism, post-colonialism, etc.) has very little to do with a debate around the IDEAS but rather is purely an objection to the language. Again - I understand the distaste for what seems like some bullshit, high-falutin, Ivory Tower snobbery or what have you. However, rejecting the idea just because you don't like the packaging often times comes off seeming rather anti-intellectual, i.e. "if I don't understand it, it must be bullshit" which, to me, isn't a really great way to treat knowledge.
I don't understand string theory and more to the point: I don't necessarily care to. But I'd never go up to a conceptual physicist and scoff, "quantum mechanics is nonsense." Will string theory - or postmodern theory or deconstructionism - better my life? Will I be worse off NOT understanding these things? No. But that doesn't mean they lack worth or that they're not intellectually valid.
Lastly, and this is very specific to postmodernism: the problem with that term is that, in some ways, it's become TOO popular and as a result, what it actually means has become distorted and in some ways, forgotten. A lot of folks - myself included once upon a time - treat PM like it can apply to practically anything that seems unusual or inexplicable or obtuse (see the abuse of the PM graemlin for example). Given that, I guess it's no surprise that someone would find PM to be nonsense - it literally has lacked sense in the ways it's become misapplied.
To me, the easiest test for whether PM makes sense or not is to simply ask: "well, do we still live in an era of modernism?" and while it's not like modernism - as a school of thought, as social aspiration - is dead and rotting, but all around us, our institutions and cultural practices have abandoned the basic tenets of modernism. We don't believe in Truth with a capital "T". We don't believe in the linear progress of history (i.e. that things always get better). We don't believe in a centralized vision of control and planning. (Obviously, there are many people who still believe in all these things but in general, Modernism doesn't really hold sway as a social, intellectual, economic or political ideal in the way it did in say, the 1940s).
Postmodernism simply describes that condition. The layman's speak is built into the term itself: "post modernism" = "what comes after modernism is over".
Think of Los Angeles; it's often described as a PM city and that doesn't have to mean it's turned into Blade Runner. It just means that the kind of Modernist urban planning, master plan model that guided the development of cities like New York didn't apply when it came to the explosion of suburban sprawl, death of downtown and competing development interests that sprung up in Southern California post-WWII (though that process actually begins much earlier in many ways). That's not to say L.A. is all chaos and no order - as D.J. Waldie notes in his smackdown of Mike Davis, L.A. is hyper-planned...but not in a central fashion, not with a single body or person (like NY's infamous Robert Moses) guiding that direction. That difference in approach to development - de-centralized, competing, even contradictory impulses, etc. - produces a city that's unlike any other in terms of its use of space, its density, its architectural mix. And it's definitely NOT a city that really conforms to the ideals of Modernism, nor is Los Angeles a throwback to some earlier city model. Hence, it's postmodern.
How difficult is this phrase : "Jacques Derrida (who also passed.." No shit Saussure passed earlier it's obvious I wasn't talking about him.
Also, check your lineage - Kenneth Burke was a vital precursor to the deconstruction thought movement with his "logological" emphasis on a rhetoric of relations over a logic of substances.
I meant that it makes no sense to say that Saussure was "a critic involved in the movement". He was a linguist (not a critic) who died decades before Derrida, the founder of deconstruction, was born.
Similarly, to say Burke was "involved" also makes no sense. Being a "vital precursor" (which I would dispute, anyway -his thinking is very different) is obviously not the same thing as being "involved".
Apparently Thes One has done digging in more than just dusty record crates. I, for one, am both
Not that I'm choosing sides.
I never really liked baudrillard. He was a cultural critic who seemed to like to fuck with people and put on a show.
Derrida was good, but was more for literay criticism.
Foucault I thought was great because he was applying it to society.
The main tenents have been broken down of deconstructionism, and there's a lot more tenents of post structural or postmodernism. The general idea is that it's a critique of the long held Western philosophical position of finding ultimate truth in the world. Rather they see multiple truths and interpretations. That's why they get accused of being relativsts all the time.
Anyways, Foucault's work and Derrida's general premise of trying to find how power operates are good tools in social analysis. I used it in my master's thesis, and it turned out to be a good tool for explaining Islamic Fundamentalists, who in my view are very postmodern. They claim to be reviving Islam and going back to its roots, but are actually constructing a whole new interpretation of the faith.
i see your point. but, at the same time, i still don't think that deconstruction is only something that people like "derrida and his followers" do. that is, i don't think you have to know what it is to do it. and maybe you agree with me on this too. or maybe you don't.
as per baudrillard, i agree w/ motown67. he wasn't my favorite either. felt his style to be too sensationalisitc and fatalistic, kinda like reading the Y2K version of critical theory sometimes.
Just to clarify, Sokal didn't attack deconstructionism. He got upset that people in critical theory, cultural studies, and philosophy (many of whom were most likely operating under some deconstrucitonist agendas) were using terms from science, and thus attacked a large portion of the humanities.
And in regards to Odub's glos on the use of language in post-structuralism I would like to add:
Rey Chow has an interesting text (War in the Age of the World Target, only 90 pages, a short and beneficial read) that relates some of the concepts in post-structuralism to concepts in post-colonialism, specifically around the odeas of the construction of difference (the Other). One of the main points that she brings up in discussing post-structuralism is its inevitable self-reflexive deconstruction. Because language is the only way for deconstruciton to be conveyed, and because the singular site of deconstruciton is language and meaning, it was inevitable that post-structuralism would eventually become the snake that eats itself. She explains the use of language in incredibly dense, and esoteric post-structuralist texts as performative (vis ?? vis J.L. Austin's incredibly necessary How to do Things with Words); the text is actually doing what its talking about, it's using words with the knowledge that their meaning, and the medium are corrupt. One of the really weird things that happens in post-structuralist density is that it can't tell you anything that you don't already know, which is the product of the way that the language is used; it can make things clear, or apparent, and it can fill in pieces, but it never 'teaches' as we might expect language to be able to.
Another interesting text that has direct relation to daily life is Baudrillard's Society of the Spectacle. One of the more interesting points that he pithily maps out is that the celebrity serves as the unattainable occupation that keeps the contemporary Euro-American culture machine moving.
Of everything I've read, nothing has seemed as difficult as A Thosuand Plateaus. Language is imploded entirely in that book.
The only lay person's explanation of deconstruction that I know is the Tao-Te-Ching.