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

Audio recording of a 1999 lecture given at Wellek Library of University of California, Irvine.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Jean
• Baudrillard
• philosophy
• audio
• lecture
• sociology
• poststructuralism

[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.

[AlvisaMinidoruv]

@Alfrunk Nice job pretending not to quote Dennis Dutton.

[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".

[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.

[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.

[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?

[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]

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]

@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]

@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,