Baudrillard – Joe Krakof Most critiques are those of substances, like the capitalism critique which can speak to the consumerist policies of the armative. The form is how and the content is what in a given debate. The Baudrillard Baudrillard critique speaks about how our society has been concentrated with the profusion of information, and information is as simple as a claim to a capital ‘T truth about the world. !e dont "ust receive information# we consume it like anything else. The presentation of an argument within a debate is in fact contrary to its own intent, our evidence that the usage of facts and evidence is uniquely dissuasive. $or e%ample, warming scientists come out with long papers to prove warming, and then to disprove the theism argument and it "ust goes on and on again. Theres also psychological psychological evidence of how information information technology creates a kind of overload of the individual psyche that we are unable to make sense of the world. &e situates this not as the collapse of truth, but of meaning, and he ties 'iet(sche meaning of nihilism to the advent of media)technology and factory reproduction and standardi(ation. The !ork of *rt in the *ge of Technological +eproduction, but the entire introduction is about when he was a kind there was a lions head door knocker, and he thought it was beautiful, and then he was thirty he saw the e%act same door knocker reproduced in the same city and he engaged in a t of melancholia and didnt leave his room. !hen you can reproduce reproduce anything on command that is the true crisis of nihilism. !alter Ben"amin took his life in -/0, but one the last thing he did was wrote the !ork of *rt in the age of mechanical reproduction. This is an era in which sign value has been attached to the micro) fabric of all life, how something signies, how something conveys meaning is the most important thing. +ather than the collapse of something like religion, its about the innite reproduction reproduction of everything. 1t is impossible to form meaningful relationships about anything because they are all mired in a technological super structure that destroys the possibility for uniqueness. Baudrillard insists nihilism is worse because of technological reproduction because there is no aesthetics, the singularity of any aesthetic e%perience is impossible. !e have rendered the world meaningless through our attempt to impose meaning onto it. 2igns can be words, images, representations, videos, advertisements. +eferents are the real thing the sign refers to, but this pact has been broken, we are now overloaded with signs that no longer refer to any real ob"ect. 3anguage and signication has become orbital but it is achieving escape velocity, we long for a world that is grounded and we could believe in, but now we are in the hyperreal. Baudrillard says reality was born when 4alileo looked through a telescope and assumed we could have a transparent relationship with the world around him. Baudrillard picks an opaque and transparent metaphor, 4alileo trying to create a one to one relationship relationship between sign and referent 5 this is called the will to transparency, to make the world understandable. This has been been the driving driving force of western violence, violence, and coloni(ation coloni(ation a pro"ect pro"ect of knowledge accumulation. !e discussed the all)seeing eye of metaphysics, this is similar, it is the presupposition the human can have a transparent surrounding of the world around them. * simulacrum is a copy without an original. * couple e%amples of this 5 a prototype, a model of a building is used to sell the idea of the building and then the building is built. The original is unfaithful to the translation rather than the other way. 1n the movie blade runner, ford has to nd replicants but doesnt know if hes a replicant and that makes him question his own very e%istence. !e want language to be a copy of reality, but its a linguistic concept we created, every word we have is a simulacrum. 1t is the truth that we hide none.
There is nothing that we have not already encountered that has not already been encountered by a hulking source of media which has processed it. !hen you look at your facebook, it that you, or you playing a role. 1s that youre body, is it attached to your body, or is it a copy of you. 6ven in their real life, everything is already signifying, your day to day life is not your real life. !hat is an armative but a simulated ob"ect, youre giving speeches to reproduce information, but then you go through debates with things that you have. The idea that there is an armative or a negative, these are simulacra. 3anguage is phenomenal, the real is the nominal. +eality is when we begin to assume some scientic relationship between language and the world that we use. !e think the world is equal to language, and if we were to take all of language and all of material e%istence those things would be the same. The problem for Baudrillard is the combination of the two, when we believe the simulacrum is real, rather than delight in the ctional nature of everything. &yperreality is a world more real than real, a world in which the real has fundamentally collapsed but the primary motor of society is to simulate the real. The pro"ect of hyperreality is a self)defeating one. Trumps o7 the cu7, hes not scripted like other politicians, he is performing a simulacrum of authenticity. &e is a result of the profusion of information, and lots of news articles were shocked how this bu7oon could be winning so they covered him on television. They thought they could prove that hes a moron who is unt to lead the country, but the e%act opposite happened. 8olitics is now a parody of itself, all politicians are playing roles like actors in a lm, and its not a question of being intelligent, but rather playing a role, simulating him. 6ven 9bama and :linton are actors playing roles themselves. ;ebate is both a result of as well a machine for the indoctrinate into hyperreal society. ;ebate assumes to be transparent and as a means of representing the ob"ective world outside of the activity. Baudrillard says that is bad and that maintain the will to truth which maintains the will to mastery, its self)defeating. Theres the commodication for a ballot, and the reduction of things like su7ering into information blips through the ballot, thats a critique of informatics, depolitici(ing and robbing these people of any agency and in the act the western spectator is able to delight in the su7ering others. 2peed are emblematic of the will to transparency, and crucially for him, radical moves which are di7erent on the level of content but maintain the form of debate as it is currently constituted are in fact worse. Theyre worse because this is what sustains the system, the ability for everything to be reduced to information, to signs, to language, he wrote this book called Forget Foucault , it is too ob"ective and it is too true. $oucaults attempt to analy(e power relations from a leftist perspective is one that seems to be insurgent but colludes with the will to transparency in the way in which it is written. Baudrillard is frustrated by what he calls the hegemony of the message in communication studies, or it is already concerned with the message, but the idea that there is a message that is conveyed is ideological. 1t presumes that there is a discrete sub"ect sender and an ob"ect receiver and in so doing reify the sub"ect)ob"ect divide. 1ts an assumption we rarely question but is in fact a validly political act, it naturali(es the sub"ect)ob"ect divide that is necessary for a host of other terrible things. !ithout a notion of sub"ect or ob"ect, no slavery, no patriarchy, no oppression anything. !hen 1 say 1 love, 1 have already cheated on you because 1 have fallen in love with language.
to debate idiots from M2> several times over, and if youre saying everything is not real, you are complicit with rape culture. ;ont shoot the messenger, were not saying it is not good that the impossibility of metaphysical claims. 1n the -? th century, these monks got together and came up with the doctrine of the idea of presumption. !e need to make people believe in 4od, then you have no ethical way to say that murder is bad. @ou should presume towards the e%istence of 4od because you might go to hell if you dont. ;raw an analogy between that and people saying oppression didnt matter, you need 4od in order to say that murder is bad. !e are actively creating our own values that decry the murder you are indicting. Baudrillard makes the role of the western intellectual versus catastrophe. @ou only need facebook because youre not alive, and reality because youre estranged. The need for western intellectuals to refer to the plight of other people is evidence of the fact how unreal our lives are, the western academic takes up the cross of people who face plight. The people who actually e%perience those forms of trauma dont need reminders about how its real, they try to forget, people who duck into an alley through a shooting and then continue on their way. They go on about how real the war is, to convince themselves, the !estern intellectuals are parasitic and use such trauma as intellectual capital on this weird market. :ards of su7ering are traded, the >' going into 2udan and then crushed that their a7 was no longer relevant. 8eoples that are victims of trauma dont e%perience it, it is so overwhelming that you dont feel like its happening. Things are put into ballots but theres lot of dangers to that.
