Re: Baudrillard - Hyperreality

[Grensinlos]

I think he does make some value statements about hyperreality, for example he talks about alienation from everything, like in hyperreality things become plastic and boring and we must continuously seek greater and greater simulations. Seems like a bad thing to me. Also, for example "in praise of a virtual crash" i think its in simulacra and simulacrum. Or even a Zizekian arg. like 'we think the system is inevitable, and we give up, making oppression inevitable.

[derritrane]

Is it merely an unwarranted idealisation of the experiences of resistance, limitation, duration, structural consistency, and the like? The possibilities of empirical consistency coerced into eternity, because of an anthropic desire that the "human" vocabulary of abbreviations called the "world" transcend all transcience? Or as Nietzsche might say, "The highest will-to-power is to imprint Being upon Becoming"...

[derritrane]

However, you must go further, contextualising this operation of nominal ascription within its constituent forces which, after considerations of representation, interpretation, meaning, and other such mutually complicit activities would eventually lead to the "what", the "thing", the "object". And "what" (lol) is the "object"?

[derritrane]

Think of it this way, when you call a rock "chair" you are choosing to assimilate the the rock-object to a particular system of meanings and a range of interpretative possibilities. You are giving it a particular role in the information drama, if you will, of the cultural totality that produced the role, the word. This has effects. On thought and perception. (Sapir-Whorf "The world shifts, from tongue to tongue")

[voterpromoter]

Baudrillard is right. The USA is wrong.

the whole country should be abolished.

[idruuum]

why?

[RylandDeath]

Think about nice pair of Versace glasses.

The value of the glasses (probably $400 bucks, right?) isn't in the tortoise shell, or the lenses, or the labor the little Chinese kids supplied, or in the boat fuel, or in the bus fuel, or in the sales person's salary: there is no value in anything real, or better, that might be seen through the lens of production.

Rather, the value is in the brand, which is:

1. a pure sign, "liberated" from a necessary relation b/w signifier and signified.

[RylandDeath]

2. exchanged in a general economy of similar pure signs

3. and as such, is consumed not in terms of any real thing (production), but in terms of its simulated reality, its pure sign value.

Calling a rock a rock doesn't make it hyperreal. But if you started putting "rock brand" rocks on the market ("you rock, rock"), their value would depend not on the particular qualities of the rocks, but on the value of the brand "rock," which would be consumed as a hyperreal.

[GodMechanism]

What Baudrillard doesn't notice is that Philosophers and scientists use words that perhaps never refer to evidence, for they cannot tell that there theories are metaphorical, at least not yet. So , in some cases the metaphor precedes the literal from the start. but perhaps this is what the progression of civilization is about, is to find our way our of our own metaphors

[GodMechanism]

Baudrillard is not that clear because his writing is example of what he is talking about. What I get out of Baudrillard is that the surfaces that we use to convey meaning eventually replace meaning. you see this everywhere. Politicians use words like change but they are the same. People dress in punk rock clothes or Dishoveled Like Wittgenstein, but they do it out of fashion, not function; In fact they behave nothing like the people that they are replicating the surfaces of

[sssswwwsssss]

Okay, to wrap up briefly:

That constituent of a sign which is not the referent can be described (but not 'defined', so to speak) as follows:

1.For my intentionality or directedness towards the concept of a rock to be instaniated, it need contain no representive content itself

2. The intentional relation I instaniate is itself contentful, and in some sense meaningful, even though it is yet to be repersentational.

[sssswwwsssss]

What modern French thought has to say about Saussare's semiology:

3. To intuit what is constitutive of the first part of a sign does not guarantee ones fixing on the second i.e. it does not epistemically entitle one to its putative referent.

So,

4. If this intentionally meaningful content (though meaningful in this strictly peculiar way) - i.e. what is called a signifier - is no longer seen as having a referent, then the totality of these two parts, the sign, can be said to be empty.

[sssswwwsssss]

5. Disneyland is like a "simulacra", because its referent in the world, i.e. the representation of some theme park,

is less epistemically contentful than ones immediate intentionality towards what Disney would have it "represent" i.e. a fun, glitzy, childhood utopia.

ciao

[randyhelzerman]

Dude, you should have made a video on all this stuff!!! You did so much work, other's deserve to see it. Question: what is this "new analytic" take on Heidegger, etc, which you speak of? I am reading Drefus's book on Heidegger.

[sssswwwsssss]

No, web cam, I'm afraid. Well, the only epistemic entitlement these writers

have comes by way of the method of phenomenological description i.e. positing the immediate content of experience as contentful. Dreyfus and Conant prefer to

take a cartesian line i.e. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are great because they don't seperate conscious and the world, they even opt for a new vocabulary in order to dissolve the opposition etc.

(c.)

[sssswwwsssss]

But this leads Dreyfus' to assertion that Husserl is an 'arch-cartesian' (see Flame's vid 1), because he completely

misses the import of what a phenomenological investigation provides, the epistemology. It's all very well saying that AI is wrong, and Heidegger was right because we found mirror neurones etc. But that approach is skipping over what Heidegger motivations really were, and making it more"analytically respectable", so to speak.

(c.)

[sssswwwsssss]

Reading the introduction to Being and Time, one sees just how many times he rehearses the notion of 'ontological' investigation. This is because "ontological" for Heidegger is not the method by which one wouldadmits what are entities, there is no room for that kind of proceedure;

such rationalizing over the world would it, on his view, be cartesian. It has to do rather with a distinction as between the ontological and ontic, the ontic being the world of objects.

(c.)

[sssswwwsssss]

The ontological is not about categories of being; its about what we are entitled to, what is disclosed, when suspending the world of representations i.e. when we conduct a phenomenologically ontological. If you open the cover to Satre's Being in Nothingness, you'll find, "B and N, an essay in phenomenological ontology". This methodology

is carried all the way through to Deleuze, and his "planes of immanence" (though shorn of any ontological presuppositions).

[sssswwwsssss]

Drefyus is not getting it wrong, but he is, I think, missing a trick. By "new analytic" then I suppose I mean this. The reappropriation of CP for the purposes of solving difficulties *within* AP itself, rather than genuinely surmounting it, as its practioners would have us believe.

apologies for rush job; got to go out now.

[sssswwwsssss]

Okay, you're giving me information theory with Prolog, and I'm rapped, so you deserve a little bit back. You going to understand this stuff well enough, Randy.

So,

(1)Perhaps the best way into this kind of thinking is to read, "A course in general linguistics" by Saussare('s students). It's a small book comprising of lecture notes. It's important because much of modern French thought can be seen as resisting the kind of reference theory or semiology which Saussare laids out there.

(c.)

[sssswwwsssss]

(2)As to signs and emptiness. A sign, by Saussare's lights, is composed of two discrete parts - one part instantiates

what is refered to in the world, the referent, i.e a mental representation of a rock (okay there then); and the other,

more opaquely, is to be see as the condition which makes possible my representing or individuating that rock (note: my register here is not something your going to find anywhere in analytic philosophy, at least not yet, so don't

[sssswwwsssss]

even begin to compare it to anything like, sense data, qualia, and so on).

(3)In continental philosophy methodology is everything. If you read Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl etc. this is explicit on the page. If, on the other hand, you're only getting the "new analytic" take on their writings i.e. Dreyfus, Conant et. al. then you may notice a distinctly anti-cartesian/cartesian picture into which their theses are assembled.

(c.)

[sssswwwsssss]

As I say, methodology is everything, so comprehending these writers from a overtly historical approach alone will not suffice. And it won't even begin to touch on what say, Baudrillaird, Derrida, Marion are up to.

(4)Finally, much of continental philosophy is postively allegeric to definitions of any kind, as I'm sure you'll be alert to. Okay, so what is to take its place?

[sssswwwsssss]

Well, its the methodolgy again, of course, and it usually takes the form of, or amounts to some weaker descendent variant of, phenomenological description (I can't go into

this here; I have left some spiel on flame's Husserl video 1, which may help - think of a primitive non-sellarsian?? intentionality). Given this then, I'm can baldly sketch that other more elusive part of the sign we encountered earlier, and say just how it is that a sign can be empty. Okay, I'll leave that for a bit later.

[venusbuddha]

do you mean both hyperreal and reality are almost the same and we can hardly distinguish them from each other. Thus, it is not a problem if they are hyperreal or real.

In a globalized world we all accept this situation. Am I understand correctly?

[zorio]

Baudrillard never makes value judgments. Hyperreality isn't bad or good, it simply is. This is a common mistake people make when reading Baudrillard, they assume he is making claims as to how things should be and not simply how they are.

He claims it to be an inevitablity, beginning with the first occasions that humans took signs or symbols to be the things themselves. The second the human being began to forget the reality, he/she began killing it.

[randyhelzerman]

But arn't they all reality? e.g. if I call the rock a chair I'm not denying any reality, am I?

Even the case of disneyland, how does that deny/kill reality? How can I tell when I've croseed the line?

[zorio]

It is no longer reality when it becomes an empty reference. Disneyland is not hyperreal because it's a "magical kingdom" ruled by a mouse (that is simply illusion, which needs reality), but because of the promise of eternal childhood. McDonald's is hyperreal because the Golden Arches, an empty symbol that mean nothing, promise an endless supply of identical food the world over.

[randyhelzerman]

thx dude can't wait for your next Baudrillayrd video.

[zorio]

No problem. I'm glad people are enjoying them.

[sigmund000]

Understanding it through a Hegelian lens helps me. The original is subject to the movement of the dialectic however with the inception of the substitute (the copy, the reproducable) the process is copied leaving out the historical dialectic.

[sigmund000]

Your statment about Disneyland still begs the question why eternal childhood is hyperreal; ie is eternal childhood more real than childhood itself. no. In my reading Baudrillard's emphasis is on reproducablity and its substitute for the real as the real. However the the main difference between the substitute and the original is that the subsistue merley provides the process of the the original.

[zorio]

Hyperreal is not more real than the Real, it displaces the Real and covers it over, effectively becoming a new order of reality indistinguishable from the Real. Keep in mind that Baudrillard was always careful to say that we were never quite at the point where the Real was completely covered over.

[valiantcold]

@randyhelzerman

Two Cavemen hear a rustle in the bushes. One screams "Run its a Lion"...They run away.

Next day when caveman A is just about to steal B's wife. B screams run Lion and then runs off with the Missus to safety. Everyday the same shout of run Lion has to be obeyed again cause the cost too great for A to ignore. This is the Power in B's created Simulacra.

I think its more about exercising a Critical mind about moments when to fight or flight... when we should just wait.

[StevenErnest]

I think Baudrillard creates this negative effect with his own terminology, "killing the real." In the Disneyland excerpt, he refers to the parking lot as a concentration camp. It seems to me he frequently leans toward the disparaging term for our hyperreality.

[fiamm77]

is it that we're killing reality, or just old "hyper realities?"

[zorio]

Baudrillard claims it's reality that is being covered over and suffocated. Hyperreality only emerges with the advent of globalization and mass culture.

[jimkel]

hyperreality doesnt exist, its just a warped state of mind, a warped perspective, dont buy into this shit.