Baudrillard

[Anonymous No.10223627]

Is he the Prometheus of postmodern times, or a pseudointellectual fraud?

[Anonymous No.10223633]

he is an obscuritanist fraud and a premier ingrate of his society and culture

>dude reality is a procession of symbols lmao

grats on retreading what the buddhists knew 3 millenia ago, you balding fuck

[Anonymous No.10224174]

>>10223633
To be fair, his theories do go a bit beyond vanilla semiotics.

[Anonymous No.10224177]

>>10223633
who peed on your rug man

[Anonymous No.10224182]

>>10223633
this

even Derrida and Foucault called him a fraud
think about that

[Anonymous No.10224183]

He's right though. Reality has been proceeded by its symbols.

[Anonymous No.10224216]

Just reading through the ideas on his wiki page he seems like another postmodernist whochas pretty theories that aren't based in any empiricism at all.

[Anonymous No.10224239]

Is there any way I can tie him in with the Jewish conspiracy? He's French right? Those guys are always up to no good.

Asking for a friend.

[Anonymous No.10224246]

>>10224239
The most prominent figures in what became postmodernism, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant, Heidegger all were whites.

[Anonymous No.10224247]

>>10224239
He used to be a marxist. Later on kinda dropped it though.

[Anonymous No.10224249]

>>10224239
How do you manage to be in every thread

[Anonymous No.10224256]

>>10224247
Just like Land
Is being a marxist and then dropping it the ultimate sign of high iq?

[Anonymous No.10224263]

>>10224256
>David Horowitz
>High IQ
my fucking sides
Nick is still a marxist
he's a hardcore accelerationist

[Anonymous No.10224268]

>>10224256
Dozens upon dozens of intellectuals in the 60s went through that process. In the early 1960s, the failure of Communism was not as apparent as it is today, so many still carried this delusion.

After the barbarism of the Stalin regime became publically known, defending orthodox Marxism ceased to be an option.

[Anonymous No.10224274]

How can someone be a leftist after reading Nietzsche

[Anonymous No.10224279]

>>10224246
Ok but is there any way I can simplify it down to just one or two items that are Jewish in nature? Like were any of those guys friends with Jews or they all read some famous Jewish something?

I think Foucault was a Jew, or maybe it was his boyfriend Derrida?

[Anonymous No.10224287]

>>10224279
There were some Jews amongst the postmodernists, just as there were some Jews amongst the most passionate defendants of Western culture, such as Husserl.

Trying to associate a branch of Western philosophy with an ethnicity is nonsense.

[Anonymous No.10224289]

>>10224274
How can someone have any political position at all after reading Nietzsche

[Anonymous No.10224298]

>>10224287
You're making this way too complicated.

Look. It's good guys vs bad guys. Jews are the bad guys. If a white dude starts making bad philosophy that's because they are either deceived by Talmud trickery or they are a Shabbos Goy that betrayed their kind for shekels.

Maybe Bauldrillard is a good guy....what does he think about family values? No Jew-puppet supports those.

[Anonymous No.10224301]

>>10224274
>how can be a leftist after reading a man who said "there are no facts, only interpretations", denounced christianity, and encouraged the unshackling of all conventional morality

[Anonymous No.10224302]

>>10224298
Everyone in the West is influenced by „Talmud trickery“, since Christianity is basically a sequel to the Talmud.

[Anonymous No.10224310]

>>10224268
>After the barbarism of the Stalin regime became publically known, defending orthodox Marxism ceased to be an option
only for moralfags

[Anonymous No.10224312]

>>10224302
But the Holy Spirit!

[Anonymous No.10224365]

>>10224256
According to our dear girardfag, accelerationism is marxism turned on its head.
>>10224302
Anon, the Talmud is only canon within Rabbinical Judaism. Christianity only shares the Torah(OT) with them.

[Anonymous No.10224381]

>>10224302
>sequel to the Talmud
How is this possible if the Talmud was written centuries after the New Testament and the events that transpired therein?

[Anonymous No.10224658]

>>10224365
>According to our dear girardfag, accelerationism is marxism turned on its head.

i can't really take credit for that one, but that is basically what it is. freudo-marxism hits a wormhole if you remove freud/oedipus from the equation and blasts off for hypermemespace. deleuze sees it coming, so does baudrillard. land picks up on deleuze's signals and goes where he goes. now there's negarestani & others.

acceleration is still marxism: economic determinism combined with whatever theory of the unconscious you think works. but *something* is making us buy and consume our way towards or through cybernetics. what's interesting about it is that it now has a left variety (negarestani) and a right variety (land), except that not only is land's inside-out marxism thoroughly anti-marxist (in the sense that wishes to preserve capital, rather than abolish it), but that he also argues for being, at heart, something like a classical liberalism.
>for his is a strange story indeed

i have no idea what the math in this picture means but it seems thematically appropriate.

also confirmed average-tier iq. i just like reading the history of continental theory like it's some insane kind of academic Royal Rumble
>bah gawd that's george bataille's music

[Anonymous No.10224671]

>>10223633
Use of words such as, 'obscurantist', 'charlatan', 'fraud' are signs of intellectual cowardice and babbyhood and in my ideal state they will be grounds for liquidation

[Anonymous No.10224777]

>>10224182
hey Derrida is cool

[Anonymous No.10224798]

is he an incredibly earnest jewish conspiracy believer?
the easy answer is satire but I want to believe this is real

[Anonymous No.10225008]

>>10224798
How would such a conclusion be reached?

[Anonymous No.10225032]

Imagine being a communist during the late Cold War. The Soviet Union is a complete shithole and all those peasants who criticized communism were right, while the flower of the French intelligentsia was wrong. How can you save the intellectual prestige of your caste without admitting you were wrong?

You invent a whole theoretical framework denying the very existance of reality. After all, if reality doesn't exist, the French intelligentsia can't be called out for its support of Stalinism.

This is all there is to Baudrillard and his entire generation of French intellectuals. They were just trying to deal with the fact that the Poujadists and the Gaullists were right.

[Anonymous No.10225038]

>>10225008
God would have to send a prophet with the answer.

[Anonymous No.10225520]

>nobody mentions that simulacra has always existed
>tfw can't counter-argue to it by saying that weiltbild didn't exist for pre-socratic tradition, Buddhists, atharvedas, and Greco-roman heroic age.

Lit used to be good. Now it's reactionary, ironic, half-assed shitfest.

inb4 lit never used to be good, its always been this way.

[Anonymous No.10226141]

I feel like Baudrillard is, in a sense, both. Both one of the most important thinkers of our times and an empty fraud.

He admits himself that "theoretical violence", not search for the truth, is the only philosophy left.

[Anonymous No.10226148]

>>10224246
>Kant
>postmodernism
I'm embarrassed for you.

[Anonymous No.10226152]

>>10226148
Read carefully. In what *became* postmodernism. With his critique of Enlightenment, Kant paved the way for what would much, much later become postmodernism.

[Anonymous No.10226160]

>>10226152
Postmodernist come from Hume more than from Kant

[Anonymous No.10226180]

>>10224246
>Kant

[Anonymous No.10226185]

>>10226160
Perhaps. Hume was white as well.

The intention of my original posting was to prove the absurdity of the claim that postmodernism is dominated by ethnic Jews.

[Anonymous No.10226196]

>>10226152
When the fuck did Kant critique Enlightenment

[Anonymous No.10226202]

>>10224274
How can anyone be a conservative after reading Nietzsche

[Anonymous No.10226203]

Baudrillard is fun to read, but ultimately pointless, I believe.

[Anonymous No.10226728]

>>10223627
A mix of both

[Anonymous No.10227178]

>>10223627
I am trying to get into him right now

Some of his proposals sound highly intriguing, others do not

[Anonymous No.10227367]

>>10226196
what is critique of pure reason

[Anonymous No.10227384]

>>10227367
postmodernism is the surrender to complete contingency. Kant was a soldier of metaphysical foundations. What in the hell are you talking about ?

[Anonymous No.10227395]

>>10224671
Absolutely. Anyone I hear using those terms just wants their illiteracy vindicated

[Anonymous No.10227407]

>>10224671
They may or may not be appropriate towards Baudrillard

He is well-known for sensationalist and ill-grounded claims, even by PoMo standards. Take his infamous Gulf War claim („it did not actually happen“) which is not only amoral towards the victims, but also empty bombast until elaborated upon further. Which is the definition of a fraud.

[Anonymous No.10228860]

itt:

t. people who have never read Baudrillard

Baudrillard, in spite of being a meandering and poorly-translated writer, made some significant contributions to postmodern theory.

Consider "Simulacra and Simulation."

Capitalism is the final, practical counterargument to Modernism. Instead of the Hegelian/Marxist inevitable progression of discourse towards absolute truth/communism, he argues that capitalism deforms and subverts this process.

ex. Someone makes an original statement or work of art. This idea/work is no longer interacted with directly as in Hegel's thesis vs. antithesis -> synthesis dialectic. Instead, it is copied. That copy then rises to equal stature/truth value to the original before the copy finally and irrevocably replaces the original.

In other words, there is no longer meaningful discourse and the progression has stopped. Truth is no longer inevitable. In fact, the destruction of meaning is the only thing that remains certain. In familiar ground that has already been tread by Foucault, the only thing that is still relevant is power.

His claim that "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place" was the title of an essay, not "empty bombast until elaborated further."

> literally the philosophical equivalent of just reading the headline

He was arguing that the experience of the Gulf War was so mediated/controlled/manipulated that the historical roles of spectator, critic or warfighter no longer existed. The narrative had been completely erased and subverted by institutional political and profit imperatives. He was not questioning the ontological status of military action in Iraq and Kuwait, but instead questioning its significance and interpretation.

p.s. To the anon who says that Kant = postmodern, please get educated or kys

Baudrillard is not a hack or obscurantist. He's worth reading. Also his entire collected works combined are shorter than Critique of Pure Reason, so that's got to count for something.

[Anonymous No.10228884]

>>10224182
even Derrida and Foucault called him a fraud
Foucault was the only one who wasn't a fraud.

[Anonymous No.10228890]

>>10227407
Have you even read it?
>Baudrillard argued the Gulf War was not really a war, but rather an atrocity which masqueraded as a war.[1] Using overwhelming airpower, the American military for the most part did not directly engage in combat with the Iraqi army, and suffered few casualties. Almost nothing was made known about Iraqi deaths. Thus, the fighting "did not really take place" from the point of view of the west. Moreover, all that spectators got to know about the war was in the form of propaganda imagery. The closely watched media presentations made it impossible to distinguish between the experience of what truly happened in the conflict, and its stylized, selective misrepresentation through simulacra.[2]

[Anonymous No.10228945]

>>10226202
To use those values to dominate the masses

[Anonymous No.10229060]

>>10228860
>Hegel's thesis vs. antithesis -> synthesis dialectic
Fuck you.

[Anonymous No.10229244]

Man, this thread is shit. But anyways, I highly respect his work. It's become increasingly apparent that I have almost no disagreements to his reasonings. The only gripe I've had with his writings was in "The Implosion of Meaning in the Media", wherein "the media" and the system encountered with Möbian logic, was separated, for no particular reason. I wondered as to why this was so, and specifically why the media was given a special set of determinations of logic, considering its subordinate nature to the simulation. I also felt as if the chapter was attempting to quell a calm, on the subject of "catastrophe" (After realizing this, the chapter gave off an even more horrific nature). Perhaps I am misguided though, due to this being from recollection, however that chapter stuck from me

[Anonymous No.10229618]

>>10228890
No one on lit reads anymore dude, there's no point in trying to talk to these idiots.

[Anonymous No.10229653]

>>10228860
>Hegel's thesis vs. antithesis -> synthesis dialectic
Hegel avoided these terms like the plague. "Thesis antithesis synthesis" was actually Fichte.

[Anonymous No.10229837]

>>10228860
Perhaps the only worthwhile contribution to this thread, thank you.

Now you finally convinced me that there is some reasoning behind Baudrillards‘ meandering, albeit I wonder why Baudrillard himself failed to articulate his position properly.

[Anonymous No.10229882]

>>10224177
You did Lebowski, you peed on my rug.

[Anonymous No.10229889]

>>10228884
Exactly wrong.

[Anonymous No.10229890]

>>10229618
In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.

[Anonymous No.10229892]

>>10228860

[Anonymous No.10230007]

>>10228860
Is that your own interpretation, or did you read this up from somewhere? (Source?)

[Anonymous No.10230052]

>>10224274
((( Atheism ))) leads to leftism. That's why.

[Anonymous No.10230183]

>>10228860
>Instead of the Hegelian/Marxist inevitable progression of discourse towards absolute truth/communism, he argues that capitalism deforms and subverts this process.
Or maybe there was no such teleology in the first place, and all you had to do to ask yourself some questions about 19th century false prophets and their idiocies was reading Hume.

>Truth is no longer inevitable.
>the only thing that is still relevant is power
Is this the truth? Is this inevitable?

>The narrative had been completely erased and subverted by institutional political and profit imperatives.
This is not news. In the Sumerian King List you find kings living 18,600 to 43,200 years. Lying and its relation to politics is about as old as narration itself.

>He's worth reading
He's just recycled Debord and McLuhan.

[Anonymous No.10230303]

When I read some of his aphorisms, I get the impression that he understands better than anyone else our human condition today.

„Smile and others will smile back. Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact you have nothing to say nor your total indifference to others. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference shine out spontaneously in your smile.“

However, at the same time, there is indeed a lot of sophist, obscuring rambling in his prose. While he does seem like he has a lot to say, his prose reinforces his image as „elegant nonsense“ postmodernist.

[Anonymous No.10230324]

>>10224381
Because time isn't linear you brain-dead dog

[Anonymous No.10230333]

>>10230183
>>Truth is no longer inevitable.
>>the only thing that is still relevant is power
>Is this the truth? Is this inevitable?

Not the poster you replied to.

I believe it is the truth, with Trump being a personification of this disgusting twist in Western politics. In the alt-right movements, you see a shameless, even celebrated abandonment of truth.

[Anonymous No.10230397]

>>10230333
Read Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. It's a history of how a bunch of merchants, with a system meant to exchange highly accurate and technical information on the movement of products and business-related things such as new wars, somehow ended up with one for programming non-merchants with detailed articles on the rising dead and other assorted stupidities.

Fake news too are about old as the earliest mass media themselves. And since I already gave you the example with the Sumerian kings, there was never this mythical Age of Truth that we somehow stopped living in, in order to end up in this "post-truth" era where people invented lying.

If anything our systems of communications have always been "pre-truth" all along, but I don't need Baudrillard to suggest me anything of the sort, earlier writings from an era of your choosing and/or a sufficient amount of skepsis should allow anyone to reach similar conclusions all by oneself.

[Anonymous No.10230404]

>>10223627
Did he fuck up?

[Anonymous No.10230412]

>>10230397

Indeed, there's nothing new and/or spectacular about pre-modern societies living in a state of pre-truth, mystification and manipulation.

But there is, on the other hand, something novel and sinister in the recent trends in modern Western politics. There *was* a phase when Western politics were about truth, about justice, about fairness and accountability.

Today, there is an almost total inability of politics to react to the actual pressing issues of a time and a regression into irrational fantasies a dmere rhetorics of "greatness" and whatever Trump is babbling about.

All of this has little to do with Baudrillard, by the way. His later works had little to do with politics at all and assumed a Stoicist, indifferent position.

[Anonymous No.10230416]

>>10230183
Baudrillard did not merely adopt and/or recite McLuhan and Debord, he drew heavily from ethnology and (post-)structuralism and whatnot.

[Anonymous No.10230634]

>>10223627
Question: Is 4chan a simulacra?

[Anonymous No.10230867]

>>10230634
We're all just acting like the faggots we out to be in order to be part of 4chan, disregarding the actuality of being faggots the rest of the time.

Yes. 4chan is a simulacra devolved from the our own hiperreality of 4chan.

[Anonymous No.10230898]

>>10230634
Lel

That is somewhat true. Baudrillard completely abandoned any philosophy that might have consequences for the real World and focuses on what is essentially First World issues.

[Anonymous No.10230997]

>>10230898
Why the hell would anyone care about places other than the 1st world. Those craeatures arn't even fucking human.

[Anonymous No.10231010]

>>10230997
I agree with you that it does make little sense for Western theory to pretend that we are still fighting daily for survival like most humans on the planet do and always did.

However, there are many people even in today's United States or France which cannot participate in the absurd amounts of wealth produced by Western societies -- at all.

Classical left-wing discourse is not over, with the masses of unemployed youth and the rise of shit-tier McJobs due to automation, it should be more alive than ever today.

[Anonymous No.10231020]

>>10231010
The poor you are talking about have netflix, youtube, MMOs, VS FPS games, and erotic role-playing in order to keep them happy.

We are building new simulations every day!

[Anonymous No.10231031]

>>10231020
Frankly, I do not know much about how the poorest of the poor in the United States live. In Germany and France, we guarantee an adequate standard of living even for the unemployed. In the United States, you afaik get food stamps and nothing else.

[Anonymous No.10231041]

>>10231020
>netflix, youtube, MMOs, VS FPS games, and erotic role-playing
Just because you're a degenerate doesn't mean the rest of the proletariat is. Seriously, who would buy this shit if they're making less than minimum wage and not siphoning money from mommy and daddy?

[Anonymous No.10231063]

>>10231031
Even employees on minamum wage can afford net-flix and an internet connection. This gives them access to endless shows, movies, and short videos. They also have a selection of hundreds of free MMOs and VS shooters...and the ERP is free!

Their food isn't going to be very good though. We have food stamps but it's very strange that a lot of poor people don't... get on it. I knew a guy who was literally homeless and refused to apply.

>>10231041
Youtube: free with internet connection
Netflix: $10 a month, or free from the pirate bay!
MMOs: free or $10-15 a month for the upper scale ones
VS FPS: Counter Strike GO is $10 if purchased on sale
ERP: F-list is free!

So you see all they need is an internet connection!! I assure all the proleterate do at least one thing on this list, many do several at once...also don't forget their anime and memes (they love that)!

Why do you have a problem with them spending their money on this? It's their paycheck!

[Anonymous No.10231074]

>>10231063
There are plenty people who cannot even get a minimum wage job.

[Anonymous No.10231081]

>>10231074
They should consult with the priests of NEET-hood. I understand they know the secrets to happiness.

Between NEET-bucks, living off their parents they should be able to afford the internet connection needed to access a million simulations.

[Anonymous No.10231094]

>>10231081
So you are arguing for the relevance of Baudrillard?

[Anonymous No.10231100]

>>10231063
>proleterate

[Anonymous No.10231184]

>>10231081
That does not mean that their material situation is ideal and there is no need for further improvement.

[Anonymous No.10231221]

>>10228860
When you say his writing translates poorly do you mean his phrasing is less obscure in French?

[Anonymous No.10231239]

>>10231184
I think people that can't get a minimum wage job are not the type of people that 'improve their material situation'.

We're talking about talentless people here.

[Anonymous No.10231441]

>>10231221
His French colleagues criticize his style of writing, as well.

[Anonymous No.10231542]

>>10231063

Don't forget pornography. That's probably one of the most effective methods of promoting mass docility.

[Anonymous No.10231608]

>>10231542
Sacre blu! You're right!!

[Anonymous No.10231811]

I can't help but think if he wrote an easily accessible introductory text to his work explaining all his ideas and terms he would be more popular.
Carl Jung was considered a fairly inaccessible writer and his popularity outside academic circles rose massively when he did something similar with Man and His Symbols.

[Anonymous No.10231821]

>>10231811
There is a strong possibility there would be nothing (or very little) underneath it if Baudrillard, or most postmodernists for that matter, were to summariue their views in a clear and concise way

[Anonymous No.10231836]

>>10231821
>muh jews

[Anonymous No.10231907]

>>10231821
I don't think that's the problem. Setting aside the fact that he wrote in French to an academic, Parisian audience, an audience that he could be confident would understand him and so all of your complaints about his translated prose are foolish: why would he bother to write a book for a wider audience (Ie ill-educated, american cyber-trash)? I detest the fetishization of French scholarship by Americans -but it doesn't follow that it is empty. What's more there are plenty of substantive complaints to be made about baudrillard, for example Sadie Plant has a good essay about problems with his thinking of gender.
Stop expecting to be spoonfed, you cheapen everything with your contempt for complexity.

[Anonymous No.10231941]

>>10224268
Ok, Peterson.

[Anonymous No.10231949]

>>10231907
You portraying Baudrillard as someone easily understood by insiders and condemned mostly by hasty, misinformed outsiders.

Meanwhile, the historic reality of Baudillard reception is (way) different. Baudrillard was condemned for his not by, but by the very Parisian poststructuralist elite he wrote for.

[Anonymous No.10231956]

>>10231941
I fucking hate Peterson with a passion for him pandering to brainlet alt-right narratives.

Nonetheless, defending orthodox Communism after the unimaginable amount of suffering it has caused is immoral.

[Anonymous No.10231960]

>>10231949
>the historic reality of Baudillard reception is (way) different
Links or references would be appreciated.

[Anonymous No.10231968]

>>10231956
Orthodox communism and Marxism is at ends with Marxism-Leninism or "Stalinism". You don't know what you're talking about.

[Anonymous No.10231978]

>>10223627

I didn't even read all the answers but know that there is nothing pseud about Baudrillard. With that said, he is a stuck up asshole with purposefully pedant and obscure wording, literally turning simple concepts and sentences into blatantly complex and unnecessarily long paragraphs that are on par with the best shitposts ever witnessed on 4chan.

[Anonymous No.10232020]

[Anonymous No.10232022]

>>10223627
omg stop talking about him and meming him on 4chan. DELETE THREAD

[Anonymous No.10232026]

>>10232020

[Anonymous No.10232036]

[Anonymous No.10232040]

[Anonymous No.10232096]

>>10231949
I'm not saying he is only condemned by outsiders, what I'm saying is that the particular condemnation of outsiders on display here is worthless. What's more it is of a totally different character than the theoretical challenges posed by both
Insider french scholars and informed foreign academics. What's more he taught at Nanterre immediately after completion of his doctoral thesis, not some provincial shit hole. His success in France occurred prior to his foreign translation.
Post-structuralist is an empty, marketing term intended for monolingual Americans. It seems like in using it you're trying to suggest that other scholars whose projects were vaguely similar to Baudrillard's found him wanting. But these thinkers don't have the commonalities that the circumstances of their translation lead people to think they do. It's largely irrelevant that Badiou and Foucault disagree with Baudrillard (unless you accept the theoretical assumptions that lead them to disagreement).

[Anonymous No.10232107]

I get the feeling that Baudrillard is, above all, an existentialist.

His central thoughts revolve around meaning and/or its loss in modernity. Which, of course, is not a new concept. But one Baudrillard executes best.

[Anonymous No.10232143]

Regardless of whether he was a rambling fraud or a philosopher sincerely interested in the truth, both would make him a genius on par with Derrida.

I wonder how he can be so smart, since he is neither a Jew, nor from an upper-class family.

[Anonymous No.10232246]

At the very least, one can say for sure that Baudrillards writing is often convoluted by hyperboles. This makes it suspicious for laymen and other philosophers alike:
>>10232036

[Anonymous No.10232352]

>>10232107
>I get the feeling that Baudrillard is, above all, an existentialist.

as a guy who loves the shit out of JB i think this is quite insightful. it might be quite instructive to think of him as a kind of double-existentialist: alienated from god from the start, but really experiencing his own death of god in the form of the death of classical marxism: death of god-as-theory. which is what sent him into his later/nietzschean/fatalistic/whatever phase.

vastly underrated though. and claims that he was somehow only a disaffected fuck cheesed off that capitalism > communism fails to get the point. JB's own work is testament to what happens when a super-sharp guy goes looking for the essence of marxism and comes up empty-handed. so capitalism 'wins,' but even this is pyrrhic: because what is even being exchanged within capitalism except more signs? his critique of reality cuts both ways: yes, for sure, capitalism > communism, but at the same time, capitalism > capitalist *society.* consumer culture in the end consumes itself by devouring its own foundations: the concept of an observable reality itself.
>aah, i miss reading baudrillard all afternoon

so he never goes full-bore acceleration in the way we think it presently (and who knows, maybe that's the right call) but he definitely is one of the intellectual godfathers of the whole thing. and with the additional caveat that he is in a sense a kind of heretic against just about everything, the left and the right.

interesting thread also gents. been fun to follow this one.

[Anonymous No.10232380]

>>10232352
>critique of reality

reality is a bad term. reality is what he ends up talking about, but it's critique of capital originally, that winds up being a kind of interior critique of theoretical attempts to explain that reality. if mass society is predicated on nothing more than consumption, this applies to the production of theoretical discourse as well, which of course he knows about. the reason his writing is so fucking interesting to read is because he implies himself in it, and brings a little more gallic verve and flair to it than, say, land does: but in the end they both seem to me to be addressing the same ideas.

and in a way, maybe the way baudrillard writes about it is the way to write about it: in a word, almost poetically. everything else seems to miss the point - that is, that there is no point - and becomes less interesting by trying to name or fix or situate one.

seems to make more sense to me to take precisely that cavalier attitude about the whole thing. what we expect from critics is that they ultimately walk this kind of impossible line between investment and detachment, but when you get a sufficiently honest or perceptive guy like baudrillard, you wind up with literature more than theory: people who know themselves too well, perhaps, to be able to say anything directly. maybe based marshall said it best, though.

[Anonymous No.10232416]

>>10232380
sorry, one more:

because isn't this essentially what baudrillard is getting at? imagine, in other words, leaving the world of the gold standard for the world of international free-floating debit/credit arrangements, pinned to nothing at all. this happens, IIRC, within the span of JB's life - does it not?

i just feel that in a sense what he is saying is related to this: that we leave behind the modernist world of money/signifiers and enter a free-floating. freewheeling world of semiocapital/dem free plays &c, and that is basically what he is channeling. he does this originally as a marxist, but he does it as a particularly honest marxist asking himself how the fuck *this* can possibly be explained (to say nothing of asking himself what side of the fence he is on, what it is that makes a marxist a marxist, a consumer a consumer, and so on). and he doesn't go the full deleuze route of theorizing infinitely about desire and schizophrenia and so on because...well...that's not him. he's hung up on the reality principle all the way to the end, which is why his work is all this long lament for modernity, but a modernity which transitions into postmodernity during the peak of his own critical/analytical powers. semiocapital was his own mechanosphere, perhaps.

blah blah. mouth sounds. ramble over.

[Anonymous No.10232417]

>>10232380
>if mass society is predicated on nothing more than consumption
In one of his books (I think the Consumer Society) Baudrillard mentions that some people or cultures create signs, some people reflect them and others absorb them. I wish he would have expanded this idea a bit but as you said he doesn't really care about making points.

[Anonymous No.10232434]

>>10232352
>so he never goes full-bore acceleration in the way we think it presently (and who knows, maybe that's the right call) but he definitely is one of the intellectual godfathers of the whole thing. and with the additional caveat that he is in a sense a kind of heretic against just about everything, the left and the right.

The JB-Accelerationist connection is there, but only in a negative critique. The big reason why JB isn't himself an accelerationist is that he doesn't believe in a transcendental horizon.

Nick Land: "This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.”

compare with JB:
"Now all we can do is simulate the origy, simulate liberation. We may pretend to carry on in the same direction, accelerating, but in reality we are accelerating in a void, because all the goals of liberation are already behind us, and because what haunts and obsesses us is being thus ahead of all the results."

In JB's formulation of time, we have already reached a terminal point, or we're stuck in a Zenonian paradox where we never reach the terminus. In Land's formulation of time, capitalism is telos, an emergent wave. Against entropy, a transcendental object in the future is determining the course of history.

[Anonymous No.10232458]

>>10232380
>>10232352
Thanks a lot for your postings, there is a lot to discover in the writings of Baudrillard, as I see.

What, however, makes me skeptical and even dismissive against any of the „critics of modernity“, starting with Rosseau, is that modernity did, by each and every account, improve the lives of humans in tremendous ways.

I mean, before the advent of modernity, most humans lived absolutely miserable, short, often abruptly and violently ending lives, deprived of education, freedom and many things deemed necessities today.

[Anonymous No.10232472]

>>10232416
I've actually been thinking about JB and the history of money. Bitcoin and Blockchain seem to fit perfectly into his theory of images. (pic related)

1. Gold Standard: 1 to 1 equivalence of paper and gold.
2. Fractional Reserve Lending: More money is printed than gold exists, based on assumptions of future growth.
3. Fiat Currency: Gold is abanonded altogether, money floats with nothing beneath it.
4. Bitcoin: Blockchain mining purposefully mimics gold mining, but this time as a pure simulation.

This cycle forms a loop, gold to fake gold, and from what I'm understanding about the recent bitcoin forks, we're repeating this double-spending cycle by duplicating the blockchain into multiple new currencies.

[Anonymous No.10232478]

>>10232458
Different guy, but JB isn't arguing that Modernity is *only* bad. In the Spirit of Terrorism, he argues that Good and Evil rise together simultaneously.

[Anonymous No.10232484]

>>10232417
yeah. i kind of want to go and re-read the mirror of production now but i have to some boring af IRL shit instead. fuck my life, fuck the world, &c
>not /lit/ & baudrillard threads tho you guys are cool

>he doesn't really care about making points.
i think it's just that he gets skeptical about them the more he thinks about it. again, isn't this the same thing that happens to land as he bores into the wormhole? it's possible that JB just got so keyed up on irony and self-awareness that in the end he distrusted anything at all that *would* have a point, because wasn't it just more capital (that is, the production and consumption of signs) or faux-revolution (which was beholden to the same process?)

so of course he is salty about *something,* but what is it, exactly? it's why i liked that other anon's post, that it was a kind of existentialism. that makes a lot of sense. but it's existentialism against theory.

>>10232434
>The big reason why JB isn't himself an accelerationist is that he doesn't believe in a transcendental horizon.
yes, this is true.

>In JB's formulation of time, we have already reached a terminal point, or we're stuck in a Zenonian paradox where we never reach the terminus. In Land's formulation of time, capitalism is telos, an emergent wave. Against entropy, a transcendental object in the future is determining the course of history.
wonderful stuff. totally agreed. & gives me the feels too. co-sign.

i read a new and utterly depressing blog today just about this. the author - very smart, all fucked up - was wondering about this very question: is acceleration perpetuating a kind of tiny grain of romanticism within it? what if machine AI actually doesn't even have a horizon and the future really is all just massive bloat? land has written about this himself once or twice.

i mean i can admit that i get attracted to acceleration probably because it's still a Narrative. true, rather than one of liberation/emancipation/happy feels it's Soul-Crushing Fuck You Feels. but, i mean, it's *something.* just megabloat and chaos isn't even depressing, it's just...i don't know, boring, sucky and shitty. maybe that is how it will be. who knows.

>>10232458
What, however, makes me skeptical and even dismissive against any of the „critics of modernity“, starting with Rosseau, is that modernity did, by each and every account, improve the lives of humans in tremendous ways.

yep. all true. i'm not really into alienation anymore myself either. i prefer functionality and sublimation. being *pathetic* and *insolvent* - this isn't really sexy. nor is bitching about, as you have said, lives massively improved by modern science.

it's a motherfucker of a double-bind tho. if you can digest the theory *and* be a cool sane person able to cope with the world, that's fucking great and maybe all that can be asked for.

>>10232472
and this...this is fucking genius.
>fuck goddamnit why can't i spend all day shitposting on /lit/ aaaah

[Anonymous No.10232498]

>>10232434
>>10232352

These ideas sound radical and spectalar, but don’t they simply mean that the Hegelian idea of progress, of the World becoming better and better, ultimately leads to nowhere?

Because this would be a very debatable point to make. Due to scientific progress, we may, one day, be able to achieve something like technical singularity or eternal happiness in a virtual reality ... or any thing we wish for, basically.

It may appear sometimes, due to the rise of the alt-right and such stuff, that the World is becoming worse again, that the Hegelian process of „today is better than yesterday has been reversed. But, actually, globally, humanity is better off each day, with the exception of, perhaps, Subsaharan Africa. The best example for this being China and India.

So the Enlightenment project is still very much alive.

[Anonymous No.10232509]

>>10232472
I have been thinking the same thing since I first heard about bitcoin.

[Anonymous No.10232532]

>>10232472
you should write some shit about this anon, or at least explore this idea at further length. something about this really appeals to me.

i mean capitalism is so interesting to think about because it is the Greatest Worst Story Ever Told (at least, if you listen to the 20C theorists, who are the most interesting guys to read). and of course it leads us up to today, and i *do* think that the most interesting theory being written on this subject *is* coming from the far-right, or at least is dealing with the big dark places opened up by land/negarestani et al (although maybe it was deleuze who started it).

but a baudrillardian history of semiocapital culminating in cryptocurrency and the blockchain? sign me the fuck up. i have disposable paypal cash and time to read on this kind of stuff.

and fuck it, even if it doesn't inspire the revolution/Change Minds/w/ev (and really...do we even give a fuck about this anymore? maybe writing is just supposed to be, you know, *fucking interesting to read* rather than polemical)...

...aah.
>also aah

good shit anon. that's all i really mean to say i think. write that shit. that sounds wickedly fucking interesting. hope you don't lose your gourd. and thanks for prompting some good thoughts within the crusty disaffected fuck i have become also.

>>10232498
>but don’t they simply mean that the Hegelian idea of progress, of the World becoming better and better, ultimately leads to nowhere?
probably. never really thought JB was much of a hegelian though, desu. even *with* all the marxism. nietzsche was always the real intellectual influence there.

>It may appear sometimes, due to the rise of the alt-right and such stuff, that the World is becoming worse again, that the Hegelian process of „today is better than yesterday has been reversed. But, actually, globally, humanity is better off each day, with the exception of, perhaps, Subsaharan Africa. The best example for this being China and India.
could well be the case. another one of our modern conundrums: maybe it's the *intellectual marxism* that is causing the problems. we would *all* like to be intellectual marxists, white-collar defenders of blue-collar reality. the present chaos may be in a sense a rather painful audit of that fantasy. so in a sense you're right about this, absolutely.

>So the Enlightenment project is still very much alive.
could be. there's room for land here (isn't there always?) that the true face of Enlightenment is inhuman machine intelligence, rather than us. and maybe that's what is getting squeezed through the dialectic
>the unfolding of truth in time

...so yeah. i'm too fucking addled at this point to be able to take firm sides on one position or the other. you could very well be right.

[Anonymous No.10232533]

>>10232484
Anon that suggested that Baudrillard is, at the core, an existentialist here.

I do not believe that I deserve much praise for this suggestion, because, well, you could say that, at the core, every post-modern philosopher is an existentialist, recognizing that there is no great narrative to give humanity meaning or even direction anymore. All postmodernists start from that.

What’s fascinating about Baudrillard is how eloquently he formulates this. Let me simply copypaste the two most popular Baudrillard quotes from Goodreads here:

„We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.“

This could as well be the Existentialist manifesto, if there ever was one:

„Smile and others will smile back. Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact you have nothing to say nor your total indifference to others. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference shine out spontaneously in your smile.“

Summarizing the state of American culture:

„Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.“

[Anonymous No.10232536]

>>10232498
>These ideas sound radical and spectalar, but don’t they simply mean that the Hegelian idea of progress, of the World becoming better and better, ultimately leads to nowhere?
>Because this would be a very debatable point to make. Due to scientific progress, we may, one day, be able to achieve something like technical singularity or eternal happiness in a virtual reality ... or any thing we wish for, basically.

To be clear, JB and Accelerationism are like opposites. There is a lot similarities in the way the see the field of play, the forces at work, but their diagnosis is very different.

Land (and most Accelerationists) do believe the world is going somewhere, and they're excited about it. The transcendental horizon is technological singularity, a 'transcendental wall' past which we cannot say anything reasonable, only wild speculations. Land, unlike most accelerationists, assumes this means humanity either goes extinct and is replaced, or it evolves into something new.

JB does not believe in a future, only simulations of all events that might ever occur or not occur. He's an out-right pessimist, a nihilist.

>>10232484
Hey, I posted that keyboard skull mosaic a few months ago. It's by Jeremy Rockwell, the grandson or nephew (I forget which) of the painter Norman Rockwell. I've seen the piece in person, it's very creepy, nasty, dirty.

[Anonymous No.10232560]

>>10232532
>you should write some shit about this anon, or at least explore this idea at further length. something about this really appeals to me.

I'll try to flesh it out. I honestly need a better basis in economic history, which I'm trying to buff up on.I've got some notes and sketches put together, with the idea of starting a blog.

In the meantime, if you want you can follow me @Moctezuma_III It's a space I've made to interact with fringe literature and theory stuff, I also post a lot of artifacts, mostly Aztec and precolumbian.

[Anonymous No.10232572]

>>10232560
oh, that's on Twitter, in case that isn't clear. I made it because 4chan has been going to hell for a couple years and I got tired of being accused of being a Jew.

[Anonymous No.10232583]

>>10232572
lel, i know this feeling

>say anything that goes beyond the horizon of your average alt-right brainlet
>get called Jew, get no more replies

[Anonymous No.10232620]

>>10232533
>I do not believe that I deserve much praise for this suggestion, because, well, you could say that, at the core, every post-modern philosopher is an existentialist, recognizing that there is no great narrative to give humanity meaning or even direction anymore. All postmodernists start from that.

true. but in terms of explaining JB *in particular* i think it's a very useful point of departure: he's the marxist-atheist. just seems helpful imho as a way of explaining his style. not every pomo guy had the same intellectual trajectory. so, i like that insight. take that however you wish!

>We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning
in the age of political emotivism - or Higher Superstition -
we may actually be heading towards the other pole of this as well: an excess of meaning and not enough information. intellectual paranoia derived from theory bloat.

>Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth
a permanent fave, this one.

>>10232536
>JB does not believe in a future, only simulations of all events that might ever occur or not occur. He's an out-right pessimist, a nihilist.
*fatalist* always seems like a better term for this to me. it's the nietzschean strain in him, the aristocratic disdain for both mass culture *and* the culture of mass revolution - it's that drives his theory and makes his writing fun to read. again, just my impressions. but.

>I posted that keyboard skull mosaic a few months ago
it's one of my favorites, thanks for seeding /lit/ with it. i never thought about what it would be like to see in person, though. and-

>Jeremy Rockwell
holy fuck that's amazing. times seemed to have changed somewhat...!

>>10232560
>I'll try to flesh it out. I honestly need a better basis in economic history, which I'm trying to buff up on.I've got some notes and sketches put together, with the idea of starting a blog.
good luck fella. most sincerely. a glorious, wonderful, cluster-fuck wormhole awaits. it's like alice in wonderland, imho.

may this heroic picture of a charging gundam inspire you then.

>In the meantime, if you want you can follow me @Moctezuma_III It's a space I've made to interact with fringe literature and theory stuff, I also post a lot of artifacts, mostly Aztec and precolumbian.
cool. will do! maybe you'll enjoy bataille if/when you get to him (you've probably read him already, given that this is a JB thread). dem aztecs/dat sacrifice/dat symbolic exchange & death.

>>10232572
>I made it because 4chan has been going to hell for a couple years and I got tired of being accused of being a Jew
kek. how did i never manage to get this achievement? i've been told to fuck off many times but never this one.

[Anonymous No.10232624]

>>10232572
I'v been called a Jew, leftist, Alt-righter, conservative, neoliberal, libertatrian, progressive, social-marxist, post modernist and dozens of other buzz-words.
I'm apolitical

[Anonymous No.10232646]

>>10232620
>>JB does not believe in a future, only simulations of all events that might ever occur or not occur. He's an out-right pessimist, a nihilist.
>*fatalist* always seems like a better term for this to me. it's the nietzschean strain in him, the aristocratic disdain for both mass culture *and* the culture of mass revolution - it's that drives his theory and makes his writing fun to read. again, just my impressions. but.

Fatalist is a tricky term to use around JB because of his use of terminology like 'Fatal Strategies'. Also, his specific critique of the simulacrum is that it has no fate or destiny. But, yes, in the common definition, JB is a Fatalist.

>>10232620
>cool. will do! maybe you'll enjoy bataille if/when you get to him (you've probably read him already, given that this is a JB thread). dem aztecs/dat sacrifice/dat symbolic exchange & death.

Bataille is a big influence on my writing and thinking lately, just started re-reading The Accursed Share. I think it's a fairly decent place to begin critiquing Accelerationism from too, which is something I'm working on.

[Anonymous No.10232687]

>>10232646
>critiquing Accelerationism
this has my attention. do explain.

[Anonymous No.10232721]

>>10232687
I'm still formulating here, so I'll just regurgitate all of the threads I'm working with. It'll be a good writing exercise for me.
-------
Bataille argues that sacrifice exists to eliminate surpluses that would otherwise have catastrophic uses (total war, nuclear war, etc). Accelerationism posits that Capitalism is a positive feedback loop, in which all surplus becomes fuel accelerating civilization towards the singularity.

These narratives aren't completely contradictory, it just depends on your definition of singularity. The typical definition is singularity= AI or Techno-Utopia or something positive.

But another meaning of singularity is it's quantitative definition: oneness. Singularity is compression of space and time, to the point where are things are exchangable and identical and in which events happen so quickly there is no longer time to reason about them. Land illustrates this concept of singularity with his Accelerationist Trolley Problem. (Pic-related). In this sense, Singularity becomes the end of Ethics, as there is no longer time to measure the consequences of decisions.

There is also the notion of Positive Feedback loops. Typically, a positive feedback builds up noise until something in the circuit limits it, or until the circuit itself explodes (imagine speakers feedbacking until they burst). To me, this is the more logical Singularity and Transcendental end point of Capitalism, one massive explosion to end all explosions.

Symbolically, the question could be compared to rocketry: Is Capitalism a Space Shuttle or a Ballistic Missile. They're essentially the same technology, once ends in utopia and the other cataclysm.

[Anonymous No.10232874]

>>10232721
interesting
as
fuck
good
sir

>Symbolically, the question could be compared to rocketry: Is Capitalism a Space Shuttle or a Ballistic Missile.

yup. this. and in a sense, we're in the cockpit and unable to tell, watching the thing assemble itself and tell *us* what to do. or is it only the *critics* who do that, while the builders are just building...whatever the shuttle/missile seems to require (and reward them for contributing to)?

in my can't-make-up-my-mind sense it seems to be both: a mysterious Project that requires the total mobilization of the earth to remain in permanent alpha build. but this is what a disaffected literary slob would say, if only because i feel i have little else to contribute to it.

you might find negarestani interesting: for him we sort of consent to building whatever the most intelligent thing seems to be and allow it to reveal itself to us (can we be, for instance, bizarro-heideggerians about technology? what if tech is a form of inhuman aletheia?)

hickman:
>...the forecast of those trends toward Cyborgization and eventual transcension of the organic altogether may not be science fiction in the century(ies?) to come, but rather part of the very naturalizing processes of technicity which has always already been there at the origin of the human. This disconnection of mammalian brain from the natural world, this long detour into abstraction and externalization of memory and culture has been neither an accident nor a mindless evolutionary process but a part of some wider impetus at the heart of the cosmos. Not some naïve telos in the Aristotelian sense, and not something that is part of some ever progressive movement to some final end, but rather an inherent part of the technicity at the inhuman core of the human itself

https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2017/11/01/daily-thought-memory-technicity-and-the-post-human/

https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2016/01/11/reza-negarestani-what-is-philosophy/

sometimes i imagine a view of capital that has a gentle David Attenborough narrator. of course to do this would be insane (imagine David's kind, grandfatherly voice laid overtop of a microchip processing plant or a sweatshop in Manila, for example). theorists can't seem to talk about what capital is without implying what it *should be*, which is of course the question nobody can answer, because it's so all-encompassing, includes actual human lives. but under acceleration, of course, we can see that capital - fueled by our desires - is completely inhumane.

>one ends in utopia and the other cataclysm.
maybe it's our desire for escape that fucks us up. failing to get the future we want, we grimly anticipate the nightmare we think we deserve. the secret and dark hope at the heart of cataclysm is that it will wipe us out too. but it would be far worse to survive it.

it's why i find post-apoc and cyberpunk mirror images of each other, the disaster externalized in the former and internalized in the latter.

[Anonymous No.10232931]

>>10232721
maybe the space shuttle/ballistic missile dichotomy is a sort of esoteric/exoteric form of humanity's most recent contribution to world religion: Marxism, now in its latest phase, and in a place where the theory and practice of which become in the end one and the same. the religion we invented for ourselves when we decided we were done with religion.

doesn't acceleration sometimes just sort of conjure the feeling of a completed and revealed text? maybe we completed theory in a sense in the same way in which various schools and styles and modes of painting were completed. and that it's just hard to let go of. the more we look into the thing, the more we feel simultaneously horrified and attracted by it: death/sex/capital forms a perfect and circuitous loop that gets more beautiful the more hideous it gets and so on.

to me at least marxism and capitalism merge into the same thing, the theory and the practice combine and all kind of reveal themselves at once. it's why i have a hard time - though i have tried - coming up with answers to the question, 'so, what should we do?' and so on.

just marvel at it, maybe. certainly the appeal of getting into philosophy for me was that it almost required you to be a ruthless, heartless fucker, achieve Max Alienation and so on - wasn't that how you did it? isn't that how you could enlarge your internal frame, be sure you weren't just producing more ideology and so on? there seemed to be all of this hatred for the middle class disguised as love.

thinking about capital always seems to give me reasons to be the shittiest possible version of myself.

[Anonymous No.10232972]

>>10232721
>is Capitalism a Space Shuttle or a Ballistic Missile. They're essentially the same technology, once ends in utopia and the other cataclysm.

anyways, question anon: you've seen pic rel, yes? in this case it kind of is both: a space shuttle for those on the shuttle, and a cataclysm for those who aren't. what did you make of this film?

if anything, the production of a class society itself in which one group lives in space in luxury seems to be the culmination of that singularity. *both* groups now live at their respective 'ends of history:' it's just that sitting there and dwelling on it would make for a crappy couple of hours.

who knows. maybe this was a marxist film. the ending seems to imply better days. maybe it's mirror/turn-taking cataclysms.

fucking hegel, man.

[Anonymous No.10233013]

he does what I think when im drunk as fuck after reading foucualt and marx all day, but am too drunk to do, that ha to have some value? he's the gymnast that goes to the limit while faltering

[Anonymous No.10233230]

>Sloterdijk asks us to consider that this melancholic default may no longer be appropriate. The decisive repression of our times, he argues, actually concerns our own prosperity: we are unsure how to live with the fact that – generally as a species, and certainly acknowledging the fact of unequal distributions – we now have affluence and surplus, for the first time in human history. We live in a true embarrassment of riches, but at the same time we retain a “syndrome of hardship simulation and deficiency illusions”. “We find the lack of lack far more embarrassing than open poverty” and our traditions are not able to cope with such abundance.

source:
https://huenemanniac.com/2017/05/09/sloterdijks-spheres/

"We find the lack of lack far more embarrassing than open poverty” seems like a quintessentially baudrillardian statement (except, of course, that he didn't write it). death by excess. after the orgy &c.

interesting to consider the differences between baudrillard and sloterdijk here as well, how they interpret nietzsche. sloterdijk doesn't seem to have JB's marxist baggage to go along with it.

and sloterdijk gets me every time. every time i think, that's it, it's all over, capitalism wins, all of this, sloterdijk still seems to have the answer: in the end, it's all so much ressentiment. he's a no-joke philosopher, that guy.

is this not also part of what makes the critique of capital difficult? because with land (and JB), *sometimes* we are talking about capital as an immaterial, abstract, time-bending, technology-spawning phenomenon, and sometimes we are talking about it in terms of its literal, spatial material, physical manifestations. should we be thinking about overhauling the system on a grand scale anymore, or dealing with these problems from within?

is there *room* for 20C-style critics on spaceship earth?

i guess that is the difference between sloterdijk and land. sloterdijk still argues that capital is only an accelerator of cultural processes - and thus anthropotechnics matter, because this *is* still all human stuff, after all - while land will say that capital effectively *is* cultural process, and indeed the only one that matters. baudrillard seems to be somewhere in between, perhaps only observing one turn into the other and back again.

just random thoughts.

[Anonymous No.10233642]

Crucial thinker of our times, yet highly arrogant style of writing

So both, in a way

[Anonymous No.10234131]

>>10232040
Baudrillard was post-ironic before post-irony became a thing

[Anonymous No.10234164]

>>10232972
Both were developed by the government under the guise of military expenditure
Proving what a hollow lie capitalism is

[Anonymous No.10234225]

>>10234164
The private sector was highly innovative as well.

The private automobile and technology sectors of former West Germany blew the technology of East Germany out of the water.

So, no, Capitalism is not a hollow lie. It simply needs heavy government intervention in some areas.

[Anonymous No.10234239]

>>10223627
I looked up the information, and yeah, sounds like he's just said that we really only perceive what we see on television. Real revolutionary.

[Anonymous No.10234535]

>>10234239
you can ridicule any philosopher by banalizing his conclusions

[Anonymous No.10234708]

>>10227407
Are you fucking retarded?

[Anonymous No.10234724]

>>10223627
based
like Christopher Lasch

[Anonymous No.10234732]

>>10234708
Feel free to prove me wrong

[Anonymous No.10235073]

>>10233230
say bro is baudrillard really that involved in marxism?

[Anonymous No.10235093]

>>10235073
Read his books and find out!

[Anonymous No.10235094]

>>10235073
Baudrillard was a hardcore Marxist really on, writing excessively about the (apparent) suppression of the working masses by Capitalism.

Starting from the 70s, he abandoned Marxism for an even more radical left-wing stance. Even later, Baudrillard abandoned the left/right-dichtonomy and economic policy altogether, assuming an indifference towards political and economic matters.

The Marxist camp began to hate him.

[Anonymous No.10235107]

>>10235094
what book of his do yu think marks his renunciation of the left right dichotomy?

[Anonymous No.10235114]

>>10235107
With Symbolic exchange and death he leaves the discourse about the real economy completely and enters his semiotic phase.

[Anonymous No.10235118]

>>10235107
Its a gradual thing and if you don't read the Consumer Society, Symbolic Exchange and Death, and Simulcra and Simulations first his later work will be incomprehensible.
If your a poltard looking for nice quotes making fun of the left just read the mirror of production which while it is from his Marxist days will let you get some quotes making the people you don't like sound silly.

[Anonymous No.10235180]

Did you know that Simulacre et Simulation is where Neo kept his discs in The Matrix?

[Anonymous No.10235215]

>>10235180
The Wachowski siblings said that Baudrillard influenced The Matrix (1999), and Neo hides money and disks containing information in Simulacra and Simulation. One critic wondered whether Baudrillard, who had not embraced the movie, was "thinking of suing for a screen credit",[27] but Baudrillard himself disclaimed any connection to The Matrix, calling it at best a misreading of his ideas.[28][29][30]

[Anonymous No.10235238]

I read Simulacra and Simulations 3 years ago and it was mostly incomprehensible. I blame it for my poor reading skill and insufficient knowledge about the scene. What would help me to understand the book more if I am to read it again?

[Anonymous No.10235256]

>>10235238
Read Symbolic Exchange and Death first. Have a clear understanding of what the stages and degrees of simulacra are. Wikipedia explains it pretty well you may wish to refer to this regularly as you read it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation#Stages

[Anonymous No.10235257]

>>10235238
tbqh, baudrillard barely gives you a chance to understand his writing if you jump right into his later writing. his style is full of hyperboles and lacking in references and argumentation.

so i recommend you to find good secondary literature instead.

[Anonymous No.10235486]

>>10235073
>say bro is baudrillard really that involved in marxism?
mos def. it's what makes him interesting. because he had an eye for detail and prose like no other. he understood the *psychology* of consumption and this is why he had such a hard time being a doctrinaire critic. he knew that, when it comes to *aesthetics* that there is a vast and open terrain that lies *between* use and exchange value: that is, *sign* value. the social worth of a commodity.

and, in particular, what it means to *inhabit a world of signs.* consider *architecture.* one of my favorite JB books is System of Objects for this reason, because he asks these questions: what happens when you shift from *ownership* to *inhabitance?* when you decorate or arrange your living space? this is the magical power of capital: it can create worlds based purely on simulation, on the interplay of signs. capital and aesthetics together become, in his words, a form of *sorcery.*

all of this stuff makes baudrillard interesting. he knows capital is real - no doubt. and that a huge part of its power is that it can make illusions, fantasies, dreams, desires, art &c become real also. but what he's wondering is, in a world in which we really can - maybe even should - imagine, create, design virtually everything,

a) where does reality go, and
b) what do we do afterwards.

marxism grounds most of his work and gives him a place to criticize *from:* he starts with an almost Platonic disbelief in the world and its illusions. and yet, at the same time, he can't find anything else in the world *except* illusions - and, indeed, these illusions are necessarily self-perpetuating. we pay for our fantasies with other fantasies ad infinitum. we consume and produce, produce and consume. based on what? some mysterious desire for happiness, some aesthetic impulse.

he was too honest to deny that capital was just too fascinating to call himself a die-hard ideologue, and yet too perceptive to convince himself that there was an underlying structure to the concept of consumption. hence his own theory: that simulation is this ontological process. it's something people do. especially in the wealthy consumer-oriented, media-saturated, super-liberalizing West in which he lived. we unfold fantasies in all directions, and capital makes these dreams come true. we just don't know why. and maybe we can't say why.

so he was a marxist critic in the sense that capital becomes this master signifier for him. but his critical sensibilities diverge from his political sensibilities. it's not even like you can say he was wrong. where the fuck are we today? trump - captain meme himself - is now the president. we are no closer to understanding consumption today than when we were in his time (unless you take land's view). wealth *still* hypnotizes us.

could hype JB to the moon and back all fucking day. no problemo. not only *because* of the marxism but because of how his writing transformed it and it transformed him.

[Anonymous No.10235508]

>>10235486

Critique of consumption culture is kinda banal and not difficult, tbqh. Greed and materialism are criticized for as long as they exist.

[Anonymous No.10235582]

>>10235486
you could even say that it's his break with marxism that makes him one of the intellectual godfathers of the world today. paradoxically, he's called a postmodernist, and yet you can read his work as being a kind of critique of postmodernity: it is, as jameson says, the cultural logic of late capitalism.

the thing is, though, is that that culture *has no logic.* the only logic imaginable for JB is the increasingly arcane relationship between signs that gives you the hyperreal world: a world in which anything goes, perhaps in which that is the only rule. JB knows that postmodernity isn't an evil plot based on the subversion of classical values. what it is is the historical entry of an ethos of consumer capital into modern life, and what this subsequently does to civilization: namely, it *radically transforms it.*

we become *free,* in other words - and don't know what to do with that. ofc, the first - and maybe the simplest - answer is, 'be happy, do your thing.' okay. so what is your thing? and who are you? released from all our obligations, liberated into ourselves, concluding - sadly - that perhaps there really is nothing else to do except individuate, we become postmodern beings. he can't get to these conclusions without believing, as he does, that first of all, there once *was* a kind of thing we could call reality (for instance, in the feudal age), and second that it is industrialization and consumer capital that bring this to an end *because of exchange and reproduction.*

*but it doesn't do this purely independently of us.* land would disagree, saying that humans are fundamentally meatbags and capital works through us one way or the other. these are the conclusions one may reach after exploring the 'libidinal economy' &c: that we become biologically wired for happiness, happiness means $$$ and so on. postmodernity is a kind of mutation of a modernity which was held together by a 1:1 relation of signs and signifiers dating back to feudalism. capital & simulation loosen these bonds and we get what we subsequently get: a phenomenon *historically* real and yet which is at the same time a *psychological* phenomenon that for baudrillard was not essentially unknowable, just fatal, enigmatic and mysterious.

>>10235508
>Critique of consumption culture is kinda banal and not difficult, tbqh.
not disagreeing, but it's sort of like saying throwing a basketball into a hoop isn't that difficult. true, it isn't. but some of us are in the NBA and some are not. baudrillard was a stylistic master like few others.

>Greed and materialism are criticized for as long as they exist.
yes, but again, i would say that what makes baudrillard worth reading is that he's doing more than just criticizing greed and materialism. he's searching for the foundations of the materialistic impulse itself. by the time he writes SE&D he's doing some pretty foundational philosophical work for the later 20C, i would say.

[Anonymous No.10235704]

money and porn are my gods

[Anonymous No.10235782]

>>10235704
that sounds like trumpism

[Anonymous No.10235798]

>>10235582
>he can't get to these conclusions without believing, as he does, that first of all, there once *was* a kind of thing we could call reality (for instance, in the feudal age), and second that it is industrialization and consumer capital that bring this to an end *because of exchange and reproduction.*

And this is exactly the part where I part with him.

While Baudrillard works fantastically and would probably be an outstanding writer of dystopian fantasy or similar stuff, he is unscientific in his diagnosis of "postmodern meaninglessness".

Because he suggests that there was, prior to some point in history, "meaning" (in the sense that we all crave for) in human life. This is bullocks. Life in pre-Liberalism Europe or in primitive African tribes is no more meaningful than ours, it is simply harder, more brutal and the people living it simply have neither the time nor the education to pander about "meaning", for they have to fight daily to survive.

[Anonymous No.10235906]

>>10235798
>Because he suggests that there was, prior to some point in history, "meaning" (in the sense that we all crave for) in human life.

i need to clarify this point then. because it's not the case that he believes that, once upon a time, there was *meaning* and now there isn't. it's about *relationships between signs create that meaning.* transcendental meaning - what he calls the reality principle - can happen when a society maintains a strict control of these signs, to the point where their effacement or vandalism really will result in bodily death or punishment. even today, as he indicates, you can rob a real bank with a fake gun and get really arrested. it doesn't matter if the gun is fake or not. it *looks* like a gun and you *look* like a bank robber. he's not saying this to troll you.

>Life in pre-Liberalism Europe or in primitive African tribes is no more meaningful than ours, it is simply harder, more brutal and the people living it simply have neither the time nor the education to pander about "meaning", for they have to fight daily to survive.

the thing is that he would agree with you. the more serious question to ask is *about the nature of that fight for survival itself.* yes, in primitive economies, you don't have industry, but you *do* have a regulation and circulation of signs - mythological, social, and so on. but there isn't *really* a huge difference between beaded necklaces exchanged between trobriand islanders and parking a ferrari outside of your house. there are *cultural* differences but not *epistemologial ones.* we are all doing the same things.

and we do this not because we *have* meaning, but because we *don't* have it. societies and cultures become what they are because they regulate and create these symbolic languages. in primitive or feudal societies the rules for transgression are explicit and unquestioned. but in *modern* - and particularly postmodern - societies, *everything is up for grabs.* why? because we can copy and simulate everything.

the reason why JB is interesting is because his concepts and his thought cuts both ways. he is a kind of radical skeptic of *every kind of meaning* in that sense. that's why your point about the tribes is interesting but i'm urging you to consider it from his perspective. *meaning has always been a problem for human civilization.* primitive societies that don't have advanced modes of exchange do their thing; post/modern societies (for JB) *liquidate all meaning from signs* precisely because *everything can be copied, simulated, and exhanged.* the loss of transcendental meaning from the world is a universal principle, but it's disastrous for social coherence. that's why early societies don't do it. but we do, because, well, *we can.*

we *do* all crave meaning. but JB thinks that to do is to court ultimate disappointment, because there *is* no omega point of reference to which we can point all signs.

couldn't find an appropriate pic for this point so w/e, GITS.

[Anonymous No.10235924]

>>10235906
>but JB thinks that to do is to court ultimate disappointment, because there *is* no omega point of reference to which we can point all signs
So we are to deny our desire to find meaning to avoid being disappointed? that is quite bleak desu

[Anonymous No.10235994]

>>10235906
so it's actually good that you bring up the case of African tribes, because baudrillard's own predecessors and intellectual influences - levi-strauss, mauss, bataille - were all very much interested in these very questions. where does *meaning* itself come from? from what does it derive? what are the elementary structures of kinship?

JB takes marxism, semiotics, and a healthy dose of anthropology in order to get at the roots of what he believes is the structure of capitalism. he's not a freudian either: he's a nietzschean. and this informs all of his work with a radical skepticism, because he is seeing the WtP everywhere.

where he gets interesting though is in his way of articulating *the modes by which this becomes expressed in modern civilizations.* he sees the same stuff happening everywhere. where does *prestige* come from? what happens when life *isn't* a purely survivalist episode anymore? this happens to the West - so does industrialization - but baudrillard's western consumer society cannot really articulate the *meaning* of its own society anymore. and not even because it does not *wish* to, but possibly because this is simply an impossibility. if all signs merely refer to other signs, what happens when we come off whatever gold standard we used to inhabit?

and - more pressingly - what if there never was a "gold standard" in the first place? in primitive societies, as he indicates, coherence is maintained by the *ritual destruction of wealth,* the potlatch. a form of sacrifice. we don't do this in a consumer society. we display, we accumulate, but we don't do anything like this. life for baudrillard are these massive semiotic arrangements. meanings create other meanings, but simulation and exchange skews with everything.

so there is, for him, no *true or final 'gold standard.'* the gold standard for him is the human need to believe in one - the reality principle - and whether it is for reasons of survival, or merely for consumption, makes no difference to him. that's his form of nihilism. we are not as removed from the primitive as we would perhaps like to think. but the primitive tribe has no higher claim to truth than we do. these are all human-all-too-human cultural processes. such is his strain of nihilism.

>>10235924
>So we are to deny our desire to find meaning to avoid being disappointed? that is quite bleak desu

not quite. you *should* refrain from trying to find your desire in *fake* or *simulacral* meanings. now, why is JB such a headache? because, of course, virtually everything to him is fake. but this is why in his later books he advocates for this seductive brand of fatalism. *know* that you are being seduced, and *seduce back.* don't be a naive robot, but don't be a sucker - or pathetic - either. is it a sustainable theory? absolutely not. does it tell people How To Fix Society? nope. he would have advocated withdrawal. was he incorrigible af for propounding it? you betcha.

was he *wrong?* tbd.

[Anonymous No.10236018]

thank you for this thread, guys (to all the non-shitposters, at least)

i learned more by reading baudrillard aphorisms than from reading whole books from hack philosophers. now i truly believe that he is *the* essential thinker of our times.

what makes me wonder is why his ideas got rejected by other big figures in the parisian tradition, most notably, derrida.

[Anonymous No.10236120]

>>10236018
>now i truly believe that he is *the* essential thinker of our times
he's up there. the title of *the guy* probably belongs to nietzsche, since all roads seem to run back to him eventually. but baudrillard is definitely something. he seems to have had a kind of zizek-level of popularity during his heyday; he doesn't quite seem as popular anymore, which is weird, because the present age would have made so much sense/nonsense to him.

>what makes me wonder is why his ideas got rejected by other big figures in the parisian tradition, most notably, derrida.
i sometimes wonder about this as well. in many ways you would think they would have been best buds: two guys out to show the emptiness of representation. i think ultimately it has to do with baudrillard being more serious about marx than derrida was and more serious about nietzsche than heidegger. imho derrida had more invested in preserving the concept of deconstruction than baudrillard did. put another way, baudrillard doesn't to me seem to mind getting rid of the concept of deconstruction itself if all that it is doing is preserving some false notion of reality (even if it is a reality with only a single characteristic: that is, that we cannot describe it). in other words, if deconstruction is only an advance of the reality principle, then how can anyone tell the difference between being a fake deconstructionist and a real one?

this is not to shit on derrida. because they would have had things in common, and similar projects: for instance, derrida will wonder how it is that signs - for example, a swastika - might enable or compel something like the holocaust. we always do things in the name of some higher, transcendental signifier that seems to us to be there and draw its power from being unnameable. it's not even a crazy perspective to take: we grant that sacred things do exist. modern stuff about kneeling during the anthem or nativity scenes in public areas remind us that symbols still have meanings to us and always will. i don't think baudrillard was ultimately as concerned with some of these questions: hence his rather dark fascination with terrorism or asking if the gulf war was actually taking place or not. but, again, perhaps this is what happens when you go hard on the neetch.

maybe part of it just has to do with the fact that derrida was ultimately more interested in literature and ontology, and baudrillard was into visual media. even baudrillard says that he never considered himself a philosopher, and preferred to think of himself as a sociologist. so maybe they weren't, perhaps, really talking about the same things.

[Anonymous No.10236801]

bump

[Anonymous No.10236804]

Is there a good English introduction into his work? Perhaps also one that explains his beef with the rest of the French academia?

[Anonymous No.10236819]

>>10236804
Honestly, No. Just jump in.

[Anonymous No.10236855]

>>10226203
Sounds like a lot of things, then.

[Anonymous No.10236860]

>>10227178
Read Impossible Exchange. It's sci fi done right.

[Anonymous No.10236902]

>>10232874
One of my favorite quotes touches on this idea.

It was the jump off point for my novel, in fact.

[Anonymous No.10236937]

>>10236804
Impossible Exchange. Great short essays, some fun ideas, and a great place to get your feet wet.

Simulation and Simulacra is okay, as well, if you want to start normie tier.

[Anonymous No.10237098]

>>10236937
Simulation and Simulacra is already beyond-point-of-no-return-tier. Like, seriously, if you read books like this, you swallowed the postmodernism-pill so thoroughly than you will never see the world like most people do.

[Anonymous No.10237138]

>>10236860
this. he's well-suited for SF, much as land is for cyberpunk.

>>10236804
get the baudrillard reader. maybe the consumer society. it's basically mainstream-ish sociology, just written by a particularly interesting guy.

>>10236902
i think i remember you from one of the other baudrillard threads, it was all about transhumanism & cyberpunk.

what was the premise of your story? did you ever get it written?

[Anonymous No.10237249]

I love Jung.

Is there anything that connects his thinking to to JB?

Also what does the man say about the gays?

[Anonymous No.10237378]

>>10223627
Both

[Anonymous No.10238195]

bumping the thread with

the baudrillard index
http://www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/pdf/book-index.pdf

and an interview with gerry coulter on the IJBS
http://intertheory.org/coulter.htm

[Anonymous No.10238355]

From what I can tell, he defines the Real and Meaning as some obscure interactions found in primal tribes and then goes on to the bombastic relevation that, since these interactions have disappeared, nothing is real anymore.

Dunno, that sounds like some Hubbard-tier („we have lost some magical power we once had“) speculative philosophy. I give Baudrillard that he is the better poet, but no more scientific than Hubbard is.

[Anonymous No.10238599]

>>10224658
>i just like reading the history of continental theory like it's some insane kind of academic Royal Rumble
Absolutely based.

[Anonymous No.10238649]

So I have read Symbolic Exchange and Death thoroughly. And I must say that, while his explanation of modern power structures is fascinating, it is also somewhat and also lacking in implication.

Short summary: for Baudrillard, the economization of life begins when societies begin to reject death, to demonize and to fear it. The desire to build a strong economy, social system and medicine, these manifestations of the desire to survive, is a result of a culture that sees death as something to be combated at every price.

Remember that many forms of spirituality, in the East for example, see life and death as a harmless cycle, where you are simply reborn again and again. So why try to avoid death at every price, if you sincerely believe in reincarnation and stuff? The Crusaders were sincerely glad to die for "heroic" goals, since they believed that heaven is where they go -- or so they thought.

In atheist societies, however, death is final and the definite end of what is supposed to be a pleasant experience. The maximalization of life is the goal. This, then, creates the practice of slavery and its "softcore" pendant, the proletariat: masses which fear death, so they owe their masters and will accept even the most humiliating conditions of life, as long as they survive. This, then, is the birth of Marxism and Capitalism: movements aimed, at the core, at the very same thing - to make life as pleasant as possible and to postpone death. Religion and spirituality which deny death are now abused by Capitalism as "useful distractions from the actual conditions of power for the working classes" and condemned by Marxism for the very same reason. They no longer serve a truly important role in organizing life, however, since both Capitalism and Marxism do not regard these things as being important. Since, due to Enlightenment thought, even the religious people of today have so much doubt inside them that they fear death.

[Anonymous No.10238655]

I love his book on Terrorism, despite not agreeing with it one bit.

[Anonymous No.10238671]

>>10238655
as with most sociological theories, those of baudrillard are not truly falsifiable. he claims that terrorism is a protest against things that the terrorists themselves probably do not understand on a conscious level.

[Anonymous No.10239117]

A problem with his writing is that his philosophical terms are cascading and dependent upon each other, so you have to read his books strictly chronologically.

[Anonymous No.10239585]

>>10238649
hnng. this post needs some (you) and bigly.

it's a fucking identity crisis. whatever it is that we call capitalism is inseparable from whatever it is that we call marxism. we turn to theory to explicate the process of capitalism and as we do so become ever-more bound up with it. this is what makes acceleration what it is: crossing the streams. pushed to the horizon, capital-as-machine-intelligence becomes the undying, all-thinking, ever-present Law we seek so that our lives can mean something.

we love It because It rejects us.

Capital becomes this kind of entity, an extended consciousness alienated from us, this thing that we produce 'unconsciously' and that as 'it' becomes conscious - so it is hoped - will explain back to us the meaning for its own appearance. it becomes Fun* to think about because theory cannot avoid becoming fatalistic gnostic poetry. speaking only for myself i feel as though thinking about capital is like thinking about trolley problems: they are purportedly about the question of morality, but work in entirely the wrong way on us, make us think about these questions in demented or arcane or tortured ways. it doesn't mean it's not true, it just means that one should surrender any hope of thinking that these problems will ever get better rather than worse.

combining economics and behavioural psychology puts rocket boosters on critical intelligence. Capital as masochistic anti-Buddhism. because we do not prohibit - nor could we - adventures in introspection, we can open up these incredible frontiers of asking ourselves what it is that the human species really desires and so on. baudrillard is, like nietzsche, a kind of antarctic explorer in this sense. i would put land in that category as well. intronauts. because critique of capital becomes a vanguard of capital itself: a massive archive of human affective disorders to which the closest metaphorical analogue becomes the City.

i *know* of course that in my own case this is all really motivated by one single and constant and unifying factor: *panic.* it is the fear that proceeds from being given not one corresponding answer to a given question, but an infinity of partial answers and ellipses.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.10239589]

>schizopoetics inbound

it is said that for the gnostics the final end and ultimate return was that the Real became identical with themselves, while they did not exist. this is the allure of cyberpunk aesthetics: the City becomes a perfect labyrinth and allegory for what it means to inhabit a field of infinite possibilities, in which perhaps the most difficult challenge of all is accepting its own latent mystery: the City - a City of the Sphinx - as master psychologist. a *plane of questioning* with a sort of tacit injunction that, while everyone is free to inquire into the nature of the City as they like, one immutable law holds: that the true nature of the City conceals itself, and punishes with the greatest severity those who attempt to subvert this tradition. to dwell in the City of the Sphinx is like a sort of incidental purgatory for philosophers punished for their hubris. like being sucked into a Dante chapter or Bosch. precisely because you thought, hey, i can handle this. after all, i'm a skeptic, i believe in nothing.

yeah, right.

Capital as lacanian symbolic realm.
Capital as belly of the whale.
Capital as necroscopic self-authoring process.
Capital as inferno.

Capital as entirely deserved upbraiding of philosophers only too happy to purge themselves of humanity in order to seek The Truth. thinking that this would only be a detour with a few snapshots.

hubris. purest hubris.

>suppose Capital were a city: what then

[Anonymous No.10239728]

>>10239589
>were/was
>who gives a shit right
>anyways just to schizopoeticize further

it is said that there are four ways to leave the City.

one is to admit that you do not live there; one is to be the Author; one is to know that for a time you left, and are now returning; and the last is to know that you never left, because the City follows you everywhere. this is, after all, how it grows; it is said that you can carry the streets away in your pocket, like a souvenir, or a curse. the City sends out no colonists; it spreads purely by memory and anecdote.

the City has no rulers, or laws, which is why people who have visited it say how mysteriously calm and orderly it all is. there are no end of translations of ancient Chinese manuscripts to be found in the bookstores here.

you can imagine the faces of those who have been to the City before: a tired aristocrat, the owner of a few bauxite mines and crumbling chateaux, heir to some mitteleuropan duchy the name of which escapes you; the owner of some rag-and-bone shop under a bridge; nameless and wandering street poets; there is a family resemblance shared between permanent exiles exiled from exile. they all looked for the heart of the City, and found it to be only as heartless as they were.

it is said that the City bears a kind of resemblance, perhaps, to the Republic of Plato, but turned inside out: a kind of sophist’s garden, but with a dire curse placed upon it: that the truth is that there is no truth for those who do not believe in truth, and this is what compels one to remain in that place forever. the City begins by welcoming in all wanderers, all exiles, all the rogues and heretics, but exiles them once again as if by an invisible and fateful anaxagorian power. whatever you think the City is, it is not that: the City punishes not with death but with continued life beyond its walls. its eleusinian mystery: once you know that you belong there, you have to leave.

those who are the worst sufferers in the City are the ones who speak the Truth, a sort of condition acquired from dwelling in the City too long. for them the City etches the patterns of its own streets and maps onto their skin, though they do it with their own nails and needles; they describe it endlessly, vexed by spirals; in these blessed ones the City truly finds a home.

then there are the passers-by, the flaneurs, who give it its more cosmopolitan and agreeable flavor: charming and witty, these dilettantes are more like emissaries and envoys. the City has no political rivals, or emissaries; it is a sort of Castalia, though a Castalia which has forgotten the difference between the glass beads and the windows. the City requires no protection: if anything, it is to be gently quarantined.

it has been said that the City is a plague and it would be better grind the last of its cobblestones to dust and scatter them; there is almost kind of a relief in thinking so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N7CkQ2-398

[Anonymous No.10239800]

>>10239728
>>10239589
>>10239585
no offense, dude, but your style of philosophizing is similar to baudrillard in the sense that its basically apocalyptic, self-serving poetry.

the implication that follows from baudrillard-ian thought, that life was somehow better before modernity and marxism, is plainly wrong. in fact, before modernity and marxism, he, as a working class child, would not even be able to become a philosopher.

[Anonymous No.10239966]

>>10239800
no offense taken. the fact is that i honestly don't know what to do with philosophy and i've become ultra-spooked by seeing an technocommercial process everywhere. putting it into apocalyptic self-serving poetry is a kind of homebrew containment unit. i'm in search of some way of articulating the problem rather than its solution. thoughts stated clearly - writing - have an almost mystical power: we read a sentence and go, yes, that's it, that's true, *that person believes that.* some sentence describes the motions of the butterflies in our stomachs, and there is a kind of momentary relief in this.

i look for ways to say things in this poetic way so that i don't say them in an ideological way. politics to me is debased rather than concretized metaphysics, and really summoning works of literature are to my mind metaphysics properly aestheticized and become something other than merely more evidence of the metaphysics of production.

>the implication that follows from baudrillard-ian thought, that life was somehow better before modernity and marxism, is plainly wrong

as i've said in earlier posts i don't think that this *is* his implication. he doesn't valorize primitive tribes. he *knows* life is brutal and stupid there - see the chapter on cargo cults in TCS. when bataille studies aztec sacrifice it's not to say that aztec sacrifice is healthy, but to inquire into these questions of ritual consumption/production as human process. these are *not* sexy - indeed, death/sex/god circuits are profoundly disturbing. in SE&D JB is appalled by wage labor and sees it, persuasively, as the master's deferring the death of the slave and the slave's consenting to have their death deferred in this way, as that other anon said. *that* is to him the reality of things. and it holds both in primitive and modern societies - but why? and how?

because, for him, we produce simulations that hide the fact that there is no truth.

and so it's worth mentioning that he refused -cynically- the title of philosopher, and called himself as a sociologist. he sees all this truth-production/simulation going on from his distant vantage point and asks - what exactly is happening here? the trap he falls into is a justified one - he says he's not a philosopher, but winds up haunted by questions of his own devising.

so he's not saying life was better before or that modernity is somehow to blame. he's observing an onto-historical phenomenon - simulation - and building his critique from there.

now, you might ask - if that is the case, then why not look at the proliferation of symbolic reference as in fact an escape from the ultimate trap of signification? why not endorse the free play of the signifier as, in fact, a potential for ending all of this oppressive horribleness? perhaps because he suspected that this would not be done in the right spirit of things, but would retain a 'reality principle' that only reproduced itself.

40k art b/c why not.

[Anonymous No.10240006]

>>10239966
the problem with reading JB is that you wind up feeling purely enervated by this sense that everything is over and we are just now hopelessly sunk in malaise. and no doubt this *is* true and we *do* feel this. see his commentary on heidegger, for instance: a portrait of total exhaustion.

http://www.critical-theory.com/jean-baudrillard-necrospective-on-heidegger/

and i love heidegger to death. maybe even more than baudrillard. heidegger's philosophy - and here's a guy even more compromised than baudrillard was - was still ultimately predicated on life being worth *something* in the end, even if it was only - only? - a questioning process, philosophy as revealing, as aletheia.

>let's try to ignore the black notebooks tho

you don't get much of this with baudrillard, of course, who is more interested in taking a flamethrower to everything that people like to believe in. and this is really why, i think, he acquired the reputation that he had - he was massively popular with the public, but disliked by other philosophers. kind of interesting. the more he tells you to abandon reality, the more you want to read why he feels that you think you should do so, and the more arcane his writing becomes. but perhaps such is the fate of lonely nietzschean emigres.

and so he reaches the rather dismal conclusions that a sociologist might reach: that at the core of civilization is this desperate need to hide the fact that there is no inherent and essential truth in things (a claim which heidegger would have rejected). but what impels him to keep writing? some sense of having *more* things to be offended by, repelled by, disenchanted by? maybe it's the case that the only thing even less ultimately hollow than capital and symbolic exchange is the critique of that system itself.

and yet his diaries are so fucking good. few could write about loneliness and disaffection like jean baudrillard. that was his strange victory: that he could always be more ironic than irony itself. it's in that place that he becomes relevant, i think: trying to find that core or kernel from which to look at a world totally predetermined by the automatic production of fakeness and find within it some reason to go on and continue and write. that's not an un-nietzschean way to look at it. it might even be the truth.

[Anonymous No.10240036]

>>10240006
>few could write about loneliness and disaffection like jean baudrillard.

perhaps, he should have stuck with that and joined the "elegant lamentation" school of beckett, cioran or ionesco, instead of jumping to poorly explained, unfalsifiable conclusions to explain what he feels

[Anonymous No.10240179]

>>10240036
>he should have stuck with that and joined the "elegant lamentation" school

i have no problem putting him in this category.

>unfalsifiable conclusions to explain what he feels

meh, i guess. i guess i just find a certain kinship with a writer who asks *what the point of falsifiability is.*

i should clarify this. the fuckhead answer to that question would be the easymode response: there isn't one, we can just do whatever, yolo (or, in the more hysterical contemporary form, 'how dare you ask me to explain my questioning!'). but this is not baudrillard's conclusion. it may in fact be the opposite: we can no more 'truly falsify' than we can produce unfalsifiable truth. rather, we get stuck somewhere in between: simulation. lying to conceal the presence of the truth. what zizek calls ideology except without either the hegel or lacan, or the belief that anything like true communism is possible. but *retaining* the sense that modernity cannot help but expose its own lack of centre.

consider deleuze, for instance:

>[deleuze] argues that philosophy has been beholden to a particular simplistic model of what thinking is, and this has never been questioned (assumed to be merely part of the common sense). Deleuze attacks this markedly unphilosophical prejudice, that would see in thought something good-natured and naturally truth seeking, a mere binary play between truth and error, question and correct response. In its place he emphasizes the problematic. Thought is the development of problems; it is these problems that give sense to questions that the respondent answers in a like sense. From ‘the answer as correct = truth’, to an examination of the sense of questions, thought is placed a further step back, at the genesis of the problem that would have one ask a question in the first place.

source:
https://epochemagazine.org/video-the-image-of-thought-deleuze-fcb8b4ee2e1

the key part of this is that final sentence: "thought is placed a further step back, at the genesis of the problem that would have one ask a question in the first place." this is what baudrillard is doing, imho - and maybe where he winds up trapped. unlike deleuze, who was really writing revolutionary texts, baudrillard remains a critic and outsider (and this is why i think he was so popular with non-academics: he showed how to make philosophy satisfyingly and fashionably inaccessible. he succeeded). they're both highly influenced by nietzsche, which is why you don't get the concern with falsifiability: they're *starting* from the truth-as-interpretation perspective and working from there. in baudrillard's case, he is looking at a world that becomes superabundantly filled with interpretations that lack referents. this is the ground that he comes to rest on: believe the lie you like - *but be sure to like it, as a lie, all the way.* in the end he became a kind of perfect mirror image of what he was criticizing: 'i am my own simulation.'

i find that utterly fascinating.

[Anonymous No.10240215]

>>10237138
>i think i remember you from one of the other baudrillard threads, it was all about transhumanism & cyberpunk.
Indeed it was.
Posting on /lit/ was pretty helpful, and I went ahead and published.
Got a review on Amazing Stories and Everything.
http://amazingstoriesmag.com/2017/07/jynabare-r-jesse-deneaux/

[Anonymous No.10240228]

>>10240179
>An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking
>mfw this based frenchman arrived at my same conclusion years before me
Why does this always happen to me girardfag? Every time I think I have an original thought I later discover it was already thought by someone else.
I guess there isn't really anything new under the sun.

[Anonymous No.10240231]

Baudrillard himself said: “I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us.”

This is what he practices in his writing: theoretical terrorism.

Speaking of which, does anyone have comfy Baudrillard interviews to share?

[Anonymous No.10240242]

>>10240179
so it's less that he had any big ideas for what society should do, and maybe more was prepared to offer himself up as a test case for what *critics* should do - namely, digest fully the heisenberg principle, and do not pretend that *merely because you are a critic* that you are somehow able to stand away from that which you are observing.

doesn't this actually make a lot of sense today? land makes the point about capital being insufficiently advanced schizophrenia - ok. we know that there is something very, very unusual going on with the libidinal economy, that our desires make us buy and consume and so on, and this gives us the clusterfuck world in which we live.

baudrillard kind of goes this unusual - and not necessarily wrong - road of *not offering any solutions* and just plunging full-on into the weirdness of hyperreality. and lord ha'mercy does he produce some fascinating stuff as a result. but the one thing that he does *not* do, in the end, is *call for anyone else's head to be taken.* unlike so many today, he's not blaming anyone or anything for this process: he's triangulating on an ontohistorical process that is depressing as fuck, but not really all that crazy, once you peel back the layers of jargon: we simulate and we make copies that imply a centre which is not there, but which is sprung into creation by our desire to imitate it. and imitation is everything. put another way, the revolution wouldn't happen because the revolution could *only* be televised: and, as such, it would never be an actual revolution.

primitive societies practice forms of ritual destruction to preserve social coherence, and we moderns break out of all of that - for a *lot* of different reasons. industrialization catapults the west ahead of the rest of the world, and revolutions political and theological continue to produce ever-more individuated, modern, abstracting beings. our problem is accumulation and bloat rather than scarcity. the only thing *we* have an actual deficiency of is what he would call reality. nor as pic rel suggests would he have signed off fully on landian acceleration either.

i think he just fits every definition of what a *writer* is and does, thinks and feels. there's a whole world there in his head. bleak as fuck, but goddamn if he isn't fucking interesting to read. and hey, if you wind up *not* falling for the next peanut advertisement you see - or, maybe even better, becoming utterly spellbound by it - how is that not just a good thing in the long run?

sometimes advocating for no hope is actually the right thing to do, if the alternative is to hope for shit that isn't there or is just going to mean heads have to roll for the Truth to come out in an orgy of blood. maybe we all have inner aztecs within us. maybe the fact that philosophy is *gigantically disappointing* is better than thinking otherwise.

and maybe all of it is an impetus to live beyond the critical, beyond the political, beyond the economic.

[Anonymous No.10240295]

>>10240228
>Why does this always happen to me girardfag? Every time I think I have an original thought I later discover it was already thought by someone else.

it's kind of a good feeling, though, isn't it? to realize that you aren't crazy? or that other people feel the same way you do? kind of inspiring, really, to think that even in the deepest darkest hidey-holes of the imagination you're more like others than you know...

...and besides, if you want to actually get those original thoughts you have to climb the ladder like everybody else. creative stimulus-response. prove everyone right and no one wrong, as the saying goes.

deleuze was a motherfucking god-tier genius tho, wasn't he. seriously. i mean it's basically impossible to think about him and not kind of sigh a little bit in relief and go, yes, that's fucking right gilles. thank god *somebody* can fucking say it how it is. it's always a feeling of relief, i find. i don't find it depressing in the slightest. it's more like having a fucking tumor removed from my stomach: thank god *that* silly presupposition is gone. phew.

then back to alienating myself and building a new one, &c, &c.

>I guess there isn't really anything new under the sun.

once there wasn't a heidegger, then there was. or lacan. or whoever. there's more coming. it may not be as optimistic as the 20C, but we're going to sort out the mind in the 21C and awesomely so. there's plenty more at the bottom of the KFC continental bucket, i reckon. just try not to kill yourself or go insane in the meantime.

philosophers just have a way of *scratching where it itches.* no doubt you know it's itchy af thinking about this stuff.

so i wish you many itches anon.

>>10240231
>This is what he practices in his writing: theoretical terrorism.

pretty much. like a scared straight for us pseudies (although maybe 'depressed straight' would be another phrase...sounds kind of weird though).

>Speaking of which, does anyone have comfy Baudrillard interviews to share?

http://ctheory.net/ctheory_wp/vivisecting-the-90s-an-interview-with-jean-baudrillard/

>theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us.

i wonder about this, though. i wonder about this. i think violence is easymode. it's what a confirmed girardfag would say, ofc. i just wonder if maybe this isn't where we ask ourselves if this is a door we want to open. doesn't this lead to the place where antifa and fascists become inseparable from each other, and where we might ask baudrillard himself how indifferent he really was to it.

it's cozy to imagine a terror/order dichotomy. a terror/terror dichotomy seems to warrant something other than choosing the brand of terror one finds most appealing. it's a compromised position. but the question is the difference between revolutionary violence and terroristic violence. it's appealing to think of ourselves as guerrillas rather than terrorists. but how do you know?

is it a question of *who puts down the gun first?*

[Anonymous No.10240304]

>>10224182
that's because he blew Foucault the FUCK OUT with this piece of writing

[Anonymous No.10240314]

>>10240304
>datass.jpg

[Anonymous No.10240323]

>>10239728
>Four Ways to Leave the city
Is this from something, or did you write it?
I really like this entry.

[Anonymous No.10240328]

>>10240304
well, no.

he argued to abandon real politics and to focus on what is basically endless ennui over some highly speculative concepts he introduced.

this, paired with his distasteful gulf war commentary, contributed to the image of postmodern philosophers as cloistered academia.

[Anonymous No.10240366]

>>10240323
original content. with the caveat that, of course, it was really prompted by a desire to respond to that other anon.

the City-as-metaphor-for-philosophy is a thing i am just fascinated with. the City as prison, but as *perfect prison* - a kind of metaphor for the critique of capital that becomes inseparable from capital itself. because i do think philosophy of a certain strain puts us into rabbit holes that we can't get out of. and maybe this is where literature - a kind of literature that is something other than more ideology, or downright pornography - comes from.

i've sort of realized that in my desire to be able to fix other people's intellectual problems i have developed a fucking colossal neurotic complex of my own. so i figure maybe if i can turn that complex into something that isn't criticism - and it resists being turned into an academic paper - then i will be able to let it go, in a sense. as it is all this shit just hangs over me like a goddamn shroud and seems to tell me to make it charming and seductive for the sake of strangers. and i always fail at this. it's like a kind of superego.

as a thought experiment:

try to imagine a deadly serious Woody Allen. as in, look at this face, but try to imagine everything it says being Very Very Serious.

now, try not to laugh.

that's me.

anywyas, thanks, tho. i'm glad you liked it.

[Anonymous No.10240384]

>>10240366
Good stuff, man.

[Anonymous No.10240395]

>>10240328
>real politics
meanwhile Foucault is a favourite in the ever expanding academic fields of critical, cultural and gender studies...

>distasteful
so was Nietzsche you soyboy

>No wonder French post-'68 thinkers, Baudrillard included, looked somewhere else for revolutionary alternatives. Failing to enlist their allies, they resolved to sleep with the enemy. It was a bold theoretical move, outdoing Marx in his analysis of capital. All of the "children of May," revolutionaries bereft of a revolution, turned to capitalism, eager to extract its subversive energy they no longer found in traditional class struggles. Updating the theory of power and the fluctuations of subjectivity to the erratic shifts of the semiotic code, they assumed that they could redirect its flows and release in their wake new "deterritorialized" figures-psychotic creativity, desire, nomadism, becoming revolutionary-in spite of the abrupt "reterritorializations" that the system was bound to impose in order to insure its own survival. (Deterritorializations result from the absolute decodification of capital) .

>Baudrillard didn't disagree with them on the nature of the beast, only on the extent of the damage. Contrary to them, he maintained that their willful distinctions between various "regimes of madness," or between thresholds and gradients of intensity (necessary to identify the direction and consistency of the flows) could not hold anymore. Libidinal distinctions would prove powerless to stem the flow. He saw them as doomed attempts to reintroduce a modicum of human agency in a process that had become both irreversible (linear, cumulative) and inhuman. Energetic and intense, capital was gradually gnawing away at every singularity. Simulating its fluidity, they had been engulfed by it. Revolution had come and gone; they arrived too late, one day after the orgy, like Kafka's Messiah. Boldly going beyond Marx, they had simply lost their moorings. "Theoretical production, like material production," Baudrillard wrote, "loses its determinacy and begins to turn around itself, slipping en abyme towards a reality that cannot be found. This is where we are today: indeterminacy, the era of floating theories, as much as floating money . . ." (SE, p. 44) . All the efforts to enlist capitalism on their side were bound to fail. The only way out of the morass was a radical leap of faith, a flight into the unknown. Only an absolute deterritorialization of theory itself could meet the absolute challenge of capital.

[Anonymous No.10242195]

Simulated bump

[Anonymous No.10242205]

>>10240328
t. burgerlander peeved because of Baudrillard's merciless mockery

[Anonymous No.10242219]

>>10223633
the world "obscurantist" gets passed around a lot these days in regards to the postmodernists.

It's obviously a pejoritive designator but I don't necessarily disagree with the characterization. Is any postmodern/continental philosophy NOT obscurantist in nature? Who is and who isn't? Are there any prominent obscurantists who are not continental?

[Anonymous No.10242232]

>>10242219
It's been a tradition since Kant. Deal with hard ideas any way you can, even at the cost of your writing.

[Anonymous No.10242442]

>>10232931
>marxism and capitalism merge into the same thing
>all of this hatred for the middle class disguised as love.
I'm young and CERTAINLY NOT well-read but I've had serious trouble figuring out where to start and where to go with philosophy because of this what you're pointing to. At this point in history it seems (to me) the ideology is so complex and multipicitous that no sane/lucid person can suss out a teleology that doesn't annihilate itself against some other framing of the same basic premises. Feels like we're swirling in a toilet bowl, my dude

[Anonymous No.10242510]

>>10238655
You mean The Spirit of Terrorism?

[Anonymous No.10242580]

>>10242219
Baudrillard was no obscurantist, dude.

If anything, he was the one of the last thinkers to bother with the actually big questions, („Can there be anything meaningful in todays culture?“, „What is the role of humans in an automated world?“) while most of the philosophers discuss trivial nonsense in their writing.

[Anonymous No.10242694]

>>10242510
Yup. Albeit I think that Baudrillard wrote about terrorism on more than just this occasion.

[Anonymous No.10243162]

>>10240242
it was you on that great thread SB reads Moldbug some time ago I remember.
Pleasure to read your stuff anon

[Anonymous No.10243238]

Imo Baudrillard is more of a sociologist in the tradition of Weber than a coherent philosopher

[Anonymous No.10244017]

>>10223627
Both

[Anonymous No.10244030]

>>10242442
>feels like we're swirling in a toilet bowl, my dude

lel

[Anonymous No.10244684]

>>10223627
Bump

[Anonymous No.10245115]

>>10240006
>still ultimately predicated on life being worth *something* in the end, even if it was only - only? - a questioning process, philosophy as revealing, as aletheia.
Yet late Heidegger himself also said (in his interview with Der Spiegel) that philosophy has disappeared, being replaced by cybernetics:
>Philosophy [today] dissolves into individual sciences: psychology, logic, political science.
>SPIEGEL: And what now takes the place of philosophy?
>Heidegger: Cybernetics.
http://www.ditext.com/heidegger/interview.html
From the same interview:
>If I may answer briefly, and perhaps clumsily, but after long reflection: philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinknig and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline.
Sounds kinda similar to Baudrillard's notion of banal vs. fatal strategy, although a religious version of it.
And one could argue that Baudrillard does feel there is "something worth living for", but rather than aletheia for him it is theory-fiction / fatal theory / radical thought. As thought becomes a useless function, its old "pragmatic" function being replaced by artificial intelligence (cf. Heidegger above), it is now free to do whatever it wants. It is useless to think, so you can think whatever the fuck you want. I think he calls this "poetic transference" in Impossible Exchange.
>the problem with reading JB is that you wind up feeling purely enervated by this sense that everything is over and we are just now hopelessly sunk in malaise. and no doubt this *is* true and we *do* feel this.
To me Baudrillard is interesting not only because of his idea that the catastrophe (the orgy) has already happened, but because he always insists on the principle of reversion - the ironic reversal going on in things themselves. So he confronts the fact that resistance is obsolete with a kind of fatalistic optimism and belief in irony.

[Anonymous No.10245144]

>>10223627
>Prometheus
He's the Alien Covenant of postmodern times.

[Anonymous No.10245211]

>>10240395
>meanwhile Foucault is a favourite in the ever expanding academic fields of critical, cultural and gender studies...
That's a bit like calling Baudrillard the high-priest of postmodernism. It's got nothing to do with Foucault or Baudrillard and all to do with Americanized academia.
Having read both of them obsessively, I can say that B wouldn't be possible without F, and B knows that. Lotringer, whose intro you quoted, said something similar in that same text if I'm not mistaken. I think Baudrillard at certain point really did believe in power and resistance and "society" as a giant civil war and all these things Foucault talks about. He believed in them more than Foucault himself did which is why he noticed that all of these things have disappeared. Hence the need to *forget* Foucault rather than simply to ignore him.

[Anonymous No.10245484]

It seems Baudrillard didn't believe capitalism really exists anymore in its traditional all-determining form, becoming another simulation of the system. In Forget Foucault in particular he seems to place more importance on cybernetics, noticing the influence of cybernetic logic on his contemporaries (Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard with their rhizomes, networks, desire flows, etc.) as well as various scientific fields (like biology with its genetic code and neuroscience).
But now cybernetics is slowly taking on the role that capitalism used to play in critique and resistance:
>Ashamed to work in Silicon Valley: how techies became the new bankers
https://archive.fo/DC1cM
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/08/ashamed-to-work-in-silicon-valley-how-techies-became-the-new-bankers
So is all this smart technology, artificial intelligence, etc. becoming just another simulation of the system? Another simulation that the system itself invites resistance to in order to perpetuate itself as meaningful? Like that Banque National de Paris advertisement where a banker-vampire cynically says "your money interests me"? Except that now a Silicon Valley entrepreneur says "your data informs me".

[Anonymous No.10246865]

Bump!

[Anonymous No.10247739]

>>10245484
>becoming another simulation of the system

oh cmon, that is simply academia talk of someone who has a guaranteed income.
capitalism is still very real in how in dictates our day-to-day lives, blessing some and destroying others.

[Anonymous No.10247829]

>>10226160
How?

[Anonymous No.10247840]

>>10247829
>>10226160
Afaik it came from a synthesis of Heidegge, who placed
>but muh feels!
above everything else, with the linguistic turn in perspective of Wittgenstein.

[Anonymous No.10247848]

>>10247840
I have no idea what that nazi had to say about Hume who is the exact antithesis of postmodernism as is any enlightement philosopher.

[Anonymous No.10247859]

>>10247848
Humes most famous view was his radical skepticism and his ultimate rejection of science as synthetic a priori knowledge.

Maybe that contains a hint. Albeit it would be a far stretch to claim that "anti-science = postmodernist".

[Anonymous No.10247898]

>>10247859
>a priori
>science

pick one

[Anonymous No.10248129]

David Foster Wallace on deconstructionists

"The deconstructionists (“deconstructionist” and “poststructuralist” mean the same thing, by the way: “poststructuralist” is what you call a deconstructionist who doesn’t want to be called a deconstructionist) . . . see the debate over the ownership of meaning as a skirmish in a larger war in Western philosophy over the idea that presence and unity are ontologically prior to expression. There’s been this longstanding deluded presumption, they think, that if there is an utterance then there must exist a unified, efficacious presence that causes and owns that utterance. The poststructuralists attack what they see as a post-Platonic prejudice in favor of presence over absence and speech over writing. We tend to trust speech over writing because of the immediacy of the speaker: he’s right there, and we can grab him by the lapels and look into his face and figure out just exactly what one single thing he means. But the reason why poststructuralists are in the literary theory business at all is that they see writing, not speech, as more faithful to the metaphysics of true expression. For Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault, writing is a better animal than speech because it is iterable; it is iterable because it is abstract; and it is abstract because it is a function not of presence but of absence: the reader’s absent when the writer’s writing, and the writer’s absent when the reader’s reading.
For a deconstructionist, then, a writer’s circumstances and intentions are indeed a part of the “context” of a text, but context imposes no real cinctures on the text’s meaning, because meaning in language requires a cultivation of absence rather than presence, involves not the imposition but the erasure of consciousness. This is so because these guys–Derrida following Heidegger and Barthes Mallarme and Foucault God knows who–see literary language as not a tool but an environment. A writer does not wield language; he is subsumed in it. Language speaks us; writing writes; etc."

In other words, it's all bullshit, but I'm gonna read them anyway because I like philosophy, after I'm done with the german idealists of course ;)

[Anonymous No.10248192]

>>10232026
Children are your after-life

[Anonymous No.10248196]

>>10248129
The philosophy of Baudrillard is not really about language. He is only applying semiotic principles to culture.

[Anonymous No.10248220]

>>10232020
I think this is somewhat true with the permanency of the internet. Although that interpretation may be a bit too literal.

[Anonymous No.10248265]

>>10248192
>implying anyone discussing postmodernism on 4Chan will ever get laid

[Anonymous No.10248273]

>>10229882
well that is just not true man, the dude does not evacuate on other people's property

[Anonymous No.10248309]

>>10248196
Are you saying he's not a post-structuralist? His writing is post-structuralist

[Anonymous No.10248460]

>>10248309
He is, but without focus on linguistics which characterizes Derrida, Heidegger, Barthes and followers

[Anonymous No.10248490]

>>10223627
WHY?! WHY MUST YOU TORMENT ME SO WITH THESE OBSCURANTIST FRENCH PHILOSOPHERS? All I want to do is come here for a patrician that will make me able to de-program Marxist girls but I am constantly faced with Frenchmen who I have not read. Can I never browse 4chan without being confronted by my lack of reading, will I ever be able to show that Kant was actually a fashy goy because I watched that one Trump Kantbot video? Will my sums to Jordan B Peterson's Patreon ever get me to actually clean my NEET room?

[Anonymous No.10248552]

>>10248490
lel

Honestly, though, the alt-right is also deeply rooted in the continental tradition of German nationalism.

[Anonymous No.10248680]

Fair-o, but Jacobin saying that they are all post-modernists is fucking dumb as shit.

[Anonymous No.10248683]

>>10248680
>>10248552

[Anonymous No.10248768]

>>10248309
>>10248460
He's definitely not a "post-structuralist", even if try hard to adopt the American approach and lump all those frenchies together. He's too much of a dualist - or rather a duelist. Just take a look at all his writing about Good and Evil, fatal vs. banal, subject vs. object, etc. Much of his notions are based on such oppositions but he puts an ironic twists to them, e.g. arguing for the supremacy of the object.

[Anonymous No.10249503]

>>10223627
This thread reminded me what utter trash most French philosophers are.

[Anonymous No.10249810]

>>10249503
T. Anglo mutt

Not here to spark race debates, but the position that the whole continental school has to be dismissed is pleb af

[Anonymous No.10250743]

>>10248768
I would say that he is mostly a descriptive sociologist in the sense of Durkheim and Weber and not grounded firmly in any philosophical tradition, albeit he does reference Heidegger and Hegel.

[Anonymous No.10251719]

baudrillard is not as obscure as he is portrayed here. in fact, he is one of the best-known pomo philosophers

[Anonymous No.10251785]

>>10251719
good post

[Anonymous No.10251819]

Egor Gaidar
Vasily Pupin
Isay Solzhenitsyn
Sergei Kara-Murza
Analom Bedromsky

[Anonymous No.10252078]

>>10251819
Wat

[Anonymous No.10252093]

>>10252078
Russian liberals who hate B.