Baudrillard - The Murder of the Real (1/6)

[Mantikal]

This Simulacra process is in high gear in the field of the genetic re-engineering of food for mass consumption. Check out these two videos on youtube also - "The Future of Food"

"FOOD, INC".

[arknell]

Please subtitle this, his accent is too distracting, and he slaughters the technical terms he's using.

[originalsessions]

Zizek certainly talks about this matter in great detail. However, he often uses Lacan's theories as opposed to Baudrillard's for the bulk of his writings. Interestingly enough, Zizek has a DVD documentary out called "The Reality of the Virtual", in which he says, at the very start: "I think virtual reality is a miserable idea. It simply means let us reproduce in an artificial digital medium our digital experiences of reality..." You should check it out. I think it's on youtube, somewhere.

[originalsessions]

I wouldn't say physical reality is lost. It is greatly masked, however, by various social and cultural distractions (the media, as you mentioned, is a primary one). Indeed, the simulacra has replaced the real, and, as a result, the real has fallen into a state of disuse and decay. Even worse is that the simulacra is being replaced with even more simulacra to the point where it is almost impossible to uncover the real for ourselves. Zizek's book, "The Desert of the Real", explains this as well.

[32peartree]

@originalsessions thanks for recommending the book. What I find most disturbing about our virtual existence -is as the image as been perfected - our form seems frozen in the now while our bodies decay. In the past the image faded with us like b/w film or eastman color - now you see video of yourself 25-years ago and it could have been yesterday. I think this robs us of something I can't put my finger on. Did Baudrillard or Zizek write about this?

[32peartree]

Yet even so - if it was impossible or not - Baudrillard seemed to recognize something we call 'the truth' or the 'real' being lost. For the desert of the real to exist this implies that the real once existed albeit in a aleatory sense. Didn't he put this down to ubiquity of the mass media?

[originalsessions]

Consistently, the conservative person is condemned with the line “Go out and live a little!” Fulfillment of life, itself, we see, is linked to this sense of materialistic consumption. In the strictest sense, it acts as a power-leverage amongst people. For Baudrillard, this creates a society that consumes based on desire and want rather than basic need. It creates a system of desiring individuals that seek fulfillment in life through consumption, further fueling the capitalist system.

[32peartree]

@originalsessions yeah but wasn't this early Baudrillard. With his later work he demolished his own modifications of surplus value - seeing them as belonging to an earlier epoch - just as he did with Dibord's spectative society.

[originalsessions]

@32peartree Like Baudrillard's "Hyper-real", Lacan made reference to an "imaginary" realm (i.e., a set of beliefs and ideals that people interpret to be true through unconscious signs and cultural symbols), distancing them from the "real". Because of things like ideological desire, people are motivated based on relative illusions as opposed to universal truths (i.e., real reality). In this way, Baudrillard's previous theories on consumerism and his later ones on simulation coincide. ^_^

[32peartree]

@originalsessions didn't he contend in the final chapter of Simulation and Simulacra that 'universal truth' was mortal. In Baudrillard's modular conception of hyper reality the 'universal truth' was lost within a procession of spiraling negativity - just another opinion. E.g. the Bolongna train station bomb was it the work of the red brigades, the mafia, the freemasons, the government - ultimately the theories spiral off into infinity - to the point where the truth becomes irrelevent,

[originalsessions]

@32peartree Universal Truth is impossible to decipher due to our inherit limits in language. Even mathematics is limited (see Godel's Incompleteness Theorem); and the so-called scientific truths we discover are without moral meaning (e.g., physical laws are measurement results; nothing more). When people make meaning, that's when they lose sight of reality. For example, it doesn't matter if one finds pollution, per se, to be morally wrong or not. The earth still physically suffers the same.

[32peartree]

Television homogenizes every thing politics, culture, sex, art - everything . more and more vacuous by the day - yet more and more savage - the spectacle of savagery like the execution of Gaddafi is all we have left to keep our pointless lives from disappearing into the mirror of simulation. Gaddaffi in this sense represents the reality principle -which is why he had to be murdered - like the real must be murdered every day

[prepetilec]

is it possible to download this somewhere?

[ErikRicardoLC]

@prepetilec you can grab the video from you tube directly.

[prepetilec]

@ErikRicardoLC

how?!?!

[ErikRicardoLC]

@prepetilec Type "kiss" before "youtube" in the URL, that is a web aplication who can download it in flv format, there are convecional software like YouTube Downloader, JDownloader and so on.

[jasonkingkel]

@TheConfessor2011 I personally try not to involve myself with the attack or defence of such analytical categories, Post Modernism, Late Capitalism, High Modernism whatever. I just find a few authors entertaining and enlightening. Baudrillard is one of those authors.

[jasonkingkel]

@Professor6871 the accusation of pessimism, skepticism and nihilism are pretty superficial and petty. They're also irrational, the critique of a supposed essence or spirit of a thing. It's also a way of argumentation that Post Modernism employs(Nietzsche&Heiddegger). It's curious isn't it that your repudiation of Post Modernism employs their derisory rhetorical tactics. Why? Because the Post Mordern virus is not contained, it contaminates or maybe it's not a virus at all but structural and Real.

[TheConfessor2011]

@jasonkingkel

Huummnn. Are you aware many scholars believe it is irrational and pre-mature to speak of a post-modern world when we still live in the modern world where much of the issues of modernism have not yet resolved?

[jasonkingkel]

@Professor6871 Of course you're right about Post-Modernism's attacks on Science, they're ridiculous and some of them betray an ignorance of Science. Let's not cocoon History and Conventional Art(or Art of any type, the creation of the Art Market, the veneration of the Dead or the praise of the facetious and absurd). Still I don't see what this has to do with Baudrillard especially or my interpretation of his work. If you wish to understand the Social World around you, Baudrillard is a good plac

[jasonkingkel]

@Professor6871 Hi, I only offered an interpretation(impression)of his work which is by turns frustrating and enlightening. I'm with Wittgenstein here when I say truth doesn't need defending, it's already present in our speculations if our speculations are worth anything. The accusation of Nihilism was thrown at those who questioned the values of their parents and were suspicious of religion, that was considered a moral outrage. Therefore the opposite of Nihilism is Conservatism whether it is re

[Professor6871]

@jasonkingkel Postmodernism is the modern nilism because it attacks scienece, history and conventional art. Its pessmistic about everything period. Scepticism is good but realtivist guff that comes out of PM's is sometimes ridiculous. Its attacks on the natural sciences are ludicious: the sperm and ovum are not constructs of sexism as some PM's have said but what they really are in nature.

[Professor6871]

Philosophy is dead that's from Stephen Hawkin's new book 'The Grand Design.' This man's talking bollocks. A drunken man in a pub speaks more since than this continential twat does.

[jasonkingkel]

Excuse the typos, there are a few!

[jasonkingkel]

If we are in living in the Hyperreal, metaphysics is also redundant, Truth with the capital T falls into redundancy also.

[Professor6871]

@jasonkingkel How can truth be redundant its there its called reality. Partical physics is about the increadbly small and not the day to day world that we live in. Without truth there's only madness and more of it. What your saying is utter nilalism which is grap. Metaphysics is bollcks for morons to follow.

[jasonkingkel]

What is by the Death or Murder of the Real, or the Desert of the Real? Inertia, profound Inertia. Again these concepts are difficult to grasp. Pornography has surpassed sexuality, it's an uber-sexualis, but Pornography turns the spectator into a masturbator, a passive recipient of images. Inertia. Playstation, Xbox, computers games, their vertiginous intensity, more exciting therefore more real than Real transform the player into a couchpotato(activity reduced to the movement of thumbs). Inerti

[Professor6871]

@jasonkingkel The reason why this is hard to contemplate is because this is utter utter nonsense. Somebody on a spliff would be easier to understand than this French idiot who hasn't done real job I bet, in his entire life.

[napkinshower]

@Professor6871 yet hes making all this money. lol so i guess..the jokes on you. make up all the lies you need to make yourself feel better about being incompetent enough not to understand intellectual philosophy. in the end, you are still expendable. i dont defend Baudrillard. i defend intelligence and attack stupidity. you are incredibly stupid. the sad thing is you refuse to try and become smarter. instead you passive aggressively attack what you dont understand. unless your 13, grow up.

[jasonkingkel]

If Baudrillard is right, his analyses is impossible. A paradox. Baudrillard is not a critic of war but of the loss of meaning. The Hyperreal, the more real than Real which is simultaneously the Death or Murder of the Real.

[jasonkingkel]

For example; War as the struggle between nations for specific military, political or economic ends, ceases to exist. The outcome is known before it is announced making the Event itself eventless, redundant even dull. Conspiracy theories abound because the Event is essentially meaningless. The Event-less War infects the Opposition(to War)which is literally pointless, acts of protest mimicking earlier acts of protest from a period when protesting had meaning because War had meaning.

[jasonkingkel]

@59media Baudrillard's work builds upon the foundation of Structuralism(Marxism, Semiology)the generation, production and the creation of meaning and also the idea that meaning is somehow attached to things thru an interplay of sign and interpreter. What Baudrillard now postulates is the breakdown between things and meaning which frees up things to mean anything. Unbound, signs interact promiscuously with a trajectory towards the extreme.

[59media]

Genius!Definition of this aspect of human behaviour.Some 'human's'.Are they negated that they must negate?The function of the ego when it has devoured it's subject ,to reach out and devour other people. 

[59media]

Genius!Definition of this aspect of human behaviour.Some 'human's'.Are they negated that they must negate?

[59media]

Genius!Definition of this aspect of human behaviour.

[jasonkingkel]

I've read the remarks on Baudrillard and except for one person, I don't think anyone really understands him, probably because of Matrix. JB isn't proposing a metaphysical, ethical or political position. Like Nietzsche, his work is based on an insight, emotion or suspicion that everything has changed and that change has gone unnoticed.

[59media]

@jasonkingkel I understand his word's,and I know he speak's accurately of the world I live in.It is multi interprative as meaning.I agree what you wrote here is a fair assessment,but of most people what you say is factual.Change goes unnoticed because it is hidden for profit not shared for profit.

[yassermatrix]

good work ..

[momoneyho666]

who's a jigga what?

[BenNCM]

He's like a cute little Ronnie Corbett! I want to take him to bed with me.

[karenjimenez]

i hate this , it gives me a headache , words cannot express how fed up i am with separating the "real " from the simulation. ahh. arghh ARGHHH AHHHHHH.

[p4n0pt1c]

I like the way his voice reverberates - like an echo from nowhere.

[Nanaeon05]

These people are wrong,sorry for being so sudden ,but true nature is just to be ..just being in this humans have always have found there answers ,answers not easily talked about ...because universe is feel it vibrates so you need to shut your mind up each for themselves and feel the universal vibration ..thoughts are always wrong if not in lineage with the universal vibration ..these are my un thought thought's :) thanks for the upload may love and bliss vibrate in our realities ...

[wenaolong]

You know, I'm frankly not impressed with these guys. I'm just not. Baudrillard, Heidegger, Husserl, Foucault, whatever. Footnotes to Plotinus, in my opinion. The same old blabberdyjabber concerning our angst about the dynamism between "unity" and "plurality", between "substance" and "property", "essence" and "accident", "sameness" and "difference". So sleep inducing to hear these guys fall in love with their own meandering musings. Hehe. Hillarious. Maybe we have too much in common.

[pilkingtonphil]

@wenaolong People always say modern philosophy is pointless rubbish etc. but I think if they looked a little deeper they'd find that it really isn't. I've found Baudrillard's chapter in "Symbolic Exchange and Death" criticising political economy extremely helpful when studying the current financial crisis - it really provided a framework for the so-called "hard facts" I read every day. Similarly Dreyfus' use of phenomenology to critique AI seems like a good practical application....

[pilkingtonphil]

@wenaolong .....Of course this has always been the case with even modern philosophy. People claim that Hegel was all babble but concede that Marx's economic theories hold a lot of water - but one is inconceivable without the other.

Frankly I could make the same claim that string theory is intellectual masturbation since it doesn't currently "do" anything and its fairly baroque. Something tells me I'd be kicking myself in the future though...

[Genki1Hasegawa]

I think it's not to be impressed w/ him, but to just be aware that In many of our 1st world countries what we are told vs. what really happend is many times completly different. We should question everything from religion to the news. The disinfo that we are fed to keep us happy/compfortable(docile). Remember: If we live a lie long enough it becomes the (truth).

[coreolis7]

@Genki1Hasegawa

Is that really true about the lie becoming real? Definitely happens with history --- most Americans no longer care why we went into Iraq. But dont you think lies will eventually bear bitter fruit? Like how plastic haunts the environment with pollutants? I think we are poised for some major consequences to reckless disregard of real limits. There is a saying, "murder will out." Most of the time, I agree, lies accumulate like layers of pearl, the core becomes invisible..

[bluemonolith88]

@coreolis7 i think it's not so much a case of lies becoming real as much as it's a case of truth being ever-malleable. since truth will always be relative and malleable, whatever mechanism of power that can influence it - political, social, or economical - will always be capable of changing truth for some pragmatic ends. if we were to believe lies can become true, then we'd have to assume there is absolute truth beyond logical truths to begin with, which seems like an untenable propostion.

[Spanglefeather]

@bluemonolith88

I agree,Truth is not some radiant Terra Incognito, some heavenly island. But the man- made world is nothing but simulations and nobody seems to notice. I can change my words on this computer because they are malleable but I cannot change the rising on the sun or the numbers of legs humans are born with. Facts of nature are not "truths" but also are not a matter of opinion to manipulated by PR men. We are losing track of the difference. That's reckless and wrong.

[59media]

@coreolis7 Murder will not out if there is a god in heaven,or a devil in hell for that matter.Most of those I meet in my proximity who have killed are in psychological hell before judgement day.The psychosis that put soldier's in Iraq.Soldier's put them there.

[voterpromoter]

unfortunately he has a very thick accent.

but when you read his books, everything will become perfectly clear.

[Alfrunk]

Some writers in their manner and stance intentionally provoke challenge and criticism from their readers. Others just invite you to think. Baudrilard's hyperprose demands only that you grunt wide-eyed or bewildered assent. He yearns to have intellectual influence, but must fend off any serious analysis of his own writing, remaining free to leap from one bombastic assertion to the next no matter how brazen.Your place is simply to buy his books, adopt his jargon and drop his name wherever possible

[iaeruo]

i have heard charges of Baudrillard as being a 'symptom of his time' (perhaps refering to the globalized consumer-culture?) - if his discourse is intentionally provocative you must ask yourself what kind of *system* helps fuel this provocation.

one can become in their own discourse, as a counter-action, less provocative...

here is a realistic counter-argument, if you don't like him then "work through" him. speaking ill of the dead is ignoble.

[iaeruo]

philosophy happens at the level of writing.

i assume that the hyperprose gives key insight, (i don't know if he tried to make this point) - the semiurgial manipulation of discourse, the manipulation you call "intellectual influence," is one and the same with the manipulation of signs by the system as such.

there are no others who "just invite you to think." thinking is always an invitation to an operating system, a text, a language, and language is always already ideological

[Alfrunk]

You're trying to complicate something that isn't complicated. You're trying to sound smart. You don't sound smart. Let's not substitute pretentiousness for intellect. And there's nothing wrong with speaking ill of the dead.

[iaeruo]

forgive me, i accept your acerbic opinion

[Alfrunk]

Wow that was unexpected.

[zeriatan]

cutting and pasting from wikipedia,...tut tut

[Alfrunk]

Non sequitur

[Nanaeon05]

thats actually realy ok with me and the rest of us that just listend without him uploading I or you wouldnt of fallen upon this to listen and make our specualtions :) namaste ...

[sociaIText]

There's a wide selection of thinkers or philosophers that Baudrillard often alludes to, criticizes and expects his audience to be familiar with. One has to put in a considerable amount of homework to appreciate his books. I don't think I'm far off the mark if I say that Foucault and Bataille are two of his most important influences. Anyway, you seem to be giving up on him too easily.

[sketchpie]

Baudrillard, though he may have read

foucault, had a lot of issues with his work, which is why he wrote the essay "Forget Foucault"

[000linend]

don't forget McLuhan...

[eyaddarras]

@sociaIText Alfrunk is deceptively passing off someone else's commentary as his own. Nonetheless, the statement was made by Denis Dutton, a university philosophy professor we might assume has read some Foucault and Bataille. Look at Dutton and Baudrillard's Wikipedia articles for more information.

[zoetropez76]

@sociaIText Yes. I definitely have some Bataille ready and open, also pen and paper when I'm studying Baudrillard, because that's the approach you really have to take, is studying him and his progression of work. Great fun though!

[Fapsamup]

@sociaIText Philosophy should be universal and comprehensible for everybody. The maker shoudn't lose himself in his own words and concepts but expand it to everyone.

[butson89]

Denis Dutton wrote that. Just making sure you know.

[Alfrunk]

I know. I'm not an expert in philosophy, but when someone makes an argument I agree with, I steal it and try to look smart. It seems to work, until someone like you points out my disgusting plagiarism.

[victor1eremita]

joke's on you. Baudrillard wouldnt object to anything youve said.

[tomsega]

@Alfrunk - Others just use Wikipedia

[colourcollection]

@Alfrunk Perhaps you have a thought regarding him that you didn't take from a Wikipedia page?

[RohmundStein]

@Alfrunk please give credit to original author

[AlvisaMinidoruv]

@Alfrunk Nice job pretending not to quote Dennis Dutton.

[ARCHETECTONIC]

Thank you for posting this - Baudrillard in English, live!! Awesome...

[venusbuddha]

interesting