we actually sick of sex, of difference, of emancipation, of culture With this provocative taunt, the indomitable sociologist Jean Baudrillard challenges us to face up to our deadly, technologically empowered renunciation of mortality and subjectivity as he grapples with the complex issues that define our postmillennial world.
What does the advent and proliferation of cloning mean for our sense of ourselves as human beings What does the turn of the millennium say about our relation to time and history What does the instantaneous, virtual realm of cyberspace do to reality In The Vital Illusionas alwaysBaudrillard leads his readers to some surprising conclusions.
Baudrillard considers how human cloningas well as the "cloning" of ideas and social identitiesheralds an end to sex and death and the divagations of living by instituting a realm of the Same, beyond the struggles of individuation.
In this day and age when everything can be cloned, simulated, programmed, and genetically and
neurologically managed, humanity shows itself unable to brave its own diversity, preferring instead to regress to the pathological eternity of selfreplicating cells.
By reverting to our viral origins as sexless immortal beings, we are, ironically, fulfilling a death wish, putting an end to our own species as we know it.
Next, Baudrillard explores the "nonevent" that was and is the turn of the millennium, He provocatively puts forward the thesis that the arrival of the yearcould never take place because we could neither resolve nor leave behind our history, nor could we stop counting down toward our future.
For Baudrillard, the millennial clock reading to the millionth of a second on its way to zero is the perfect symbol of our time: history decays rather than progresses.
In closing, Baudrillard examines what he calls "the murder of the real" by the virtual, In a world of copies and clones in which everything can be made present in an instant by technology, we can no longer even speak of reality.
Beyond Nietzsche's symbolic murder of God, our virtual world free of referents is in the process of exterminating reality, leaving no trace: "The corpse of the Realif there is anyhas not been recovered, is nowhere to be found.
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Peppered with Baudrillard's signature counterintuitive moves, prophetic visions, and dark humor, The Vital Illusion exposes the contradictions that guide our contemporary culture and rule our lives.
Not entirely a steaming pile of horseshit, But close. I agree very much with some of the basic observations in these essays, however I found the writing style rather distracting from the content.
The loose interpretation of scienctific findings don't help either, so many of the conclusions drawn by Baudrillard seem rather unconvincing.
While it might be true that globalist mass culture creates clonelike people, oversaturation with information overloads our capacities to process it, politicization of culture impoverishes it, etc.
, I can't get on board with the cynical response of artful proliferation of this decline that Baudrillard encourages, See a quote at the end:
"The only justification for thinking and writing is that it accelerates these terminal processes.
Here, beyond the discourse of truth, resides the poetic and enigmatic value of thinking, For, facing a world that is unintelligible and problematic, our task is clear: we must make that world even more unintelligible, even more enigmatic.
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As aesthetically tempting as this view is, it is only honest to take it if you sincerely believe that the Apocalypse has already happened, of which I am simply not convinced.
And I encourage you to think hard about whether you are, The future from a rarely imagined point of view, It allows us to see the world with a bigger perspective and thought by simple questions, Sometimes surprised by the unexpected approach, . . always good/catchy titles. : easy to follow, good pace, the usual charmnostalgic while prophetic, Mind blowing! Definitely, there's a place for this text in the future of Human History, The real, the real that has beginnings and endings and mimetic/causal relations, is murdered in these lectures, In the virtual world Baudriallard observes, there can be no question of the real, as referent, as the relationship between subject, "knowledge", and object has necessarily shifted.
These lectures bring the insights and attitudes of the main French poststructualists into the New Order of cyber space.
It may have been easier to control and engineer communication and knowledge in other, previous discursive relationships to power,
The reality indicted is a most limited form of matter, our known known of sorts, the negation of a counterdiscouse of antimatter makes our world with clowds of hypotheticals an illusion in which nobody's view is distorted from the knowable object and spectacle.
However, if too, the object is bound to encounter the subject, the object's subject is also the object and "knowable" in reality.
We can even push this thesis praactically in terms of knowledge, especially religious knowledge, with a transcendental episteme entering this counterdiscursive nonreality.
I think that would be a good idea for a thesis,
Intense, prolific, thought provoking, Baudrillard pushes you to see beyond the external face of scientific and technological advancement, to really focus on humanities role in our own humanism.
How to do we approach the future when so much has changed and continues to change, Que necia vanidad la del hombre, que en un mundo a punto de extinguirse sueña con ser eterno, Jean Baudrillard's theories are in vogue again this year with the upcoming Matrix movie, I hope Lana Wachowski does him justice again, There's no point to wait or even try to avoid the apocalypse, It already happened. We're doomed. Hail the vital apocalypse! The real event of the Apocalypse is behind us, among us, and we are instead confronted with the virtual reality of the Apocalypse, with the posthumous comedy of the Apocalypse.
Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer, His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and post structuralism, Jean Baudrillard was also a Professor of Philosophy of Culture and Media Criticism at the European Graduate School in Saas Fee, Switzerland, where he taught an Intensive Summer Seminar.
Jean Baudrillards philosophy centers on the twin concepts of hyperreality and simulation, These terms refer to the virtual or unreal nature of contemporary culture in an age of mass communication and mass consumption.
We live in a world dominated by simulated experiences and feelings, Jean Baudrillard believes, and have lost the capacity to comprehend reality as it Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer.
His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and post structuralism, Jean Baudrillard was also a Professor of Philosophy of Culture and Media Criticism at the European Graduate School in Saas Fee, Switzerland, where he taught an Intensive Summer Seminar.
Jean Baudrillard's philosophy centers on the twin concepts of 'hyperreality' and 'simulation', These terms refer to the virtual or unreal nature of contemporary culture in an age of mass communication and mass consumption.
We live in a world dominated by simulated experiences and feelings, Jean Baudrillard believes, and have lost the capacity to comprehend reality as it actually exists.
We experience only prepared realities edited war footage, meaningless acts of terrorism, the destruction of cultural values and the substitution of 'referendum'.
In Jean Baudrillard's words, "The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproductionThe real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: that is the hyperrealwhich is entirely in simulation.
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