Explain Baudrillard to me, please

Explain Baudrillard to me, please.

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SACRE BLEU!!! YOU CAN'T KNOW NUFFIN!

OUT-NIETZSCHED NIETZSCHE

Symbolic exchange is the lifeblood of culture but is not distributed evenly across humans (and therefore not across classes either)

Modernity took the bourgeois symbolic order and hooked it up to about 50 NEGA-GENERATORS so that it started cranking out information until it was "only" information, until there was such a glut of shit flying everywhere that there is no stable reference to reality and no possibility of meaningful cultural exchange anymore and the information-sphere has become an autonomous suprahuman cybernetic entity beyond anyone's control

Objects and practices, originally coming from the lifeworlds of subjects, tend to reify and take on emergent behaviours and properties within the gyre of subjectless information exchange

Spirit is a runaway freight train that keeps getting faster and bigger with every day and we can no longer even see where we're going let alone think about how to pull on the brakes

"Like, if you really like think about it man, societies all like really fake and stuff. Like dude, it's so fake that nothing is really like real anymore man. Actually, dude, get this: it's so fake that it's even more real than anything that's real yeah this is really deep stuff you probably won't get it man"

>there is no stable reference to reality

I'll admit, I was first introduced to Baudrillard about four years ago but I still find him a bit beyond me. I don't understand this concept - I kind of understand what he means about the influx of replications/simulations of reality created by mass media, but I don't understand how they can REPLACE the original reality. Isn't there still a stable reference to reality? What does the original reality look like? When I travel to Tibet and climb a mountain, am I not seeing the original mountain? I've never been able to wrap my head around this.

a*glos

You are seeing what you were made to see.

I feel like he has something genuine to say but fails to

Think about how maps and efficient routes overdetermine your experience of a place. How the imposed birds-eye view is interiorized when you try to navigate.

The thing is that there is never any stable reference to reality to begin with, we always lived in a gloss atop reality, which is the life of Spirit (or the collective lifeworld of a culture/people in history). But that Spirit can have more or less stable reference to architectonic cultural practices, relations of production, cosmological relationships with the environment. Think of the level of depth that a Heideggerian analysis of "access to reality" has - for different cultures and societies, nature can be encountered as either "home" or "all that which is not home," it can be encountered as "dead matter to be conquered for human ends" or as "the sacred space to be reverently respected."

What is important here is not that these different examples of lifeworlds are different from one another, but that they are relatively stable and self-referential as regards their content. It is possible stand somewhere within the lifeworld, with all its various internal relations and underlying structural determinations etc., to take stock of all that, and to make intentional decisions from that standpoint.

We can no longer do that. There are no more standpoints. ALL meaning is thrown into the soup, just becomes part of the whirling storm or "show of signs." It is no longer possible to be "authentically" socialist because it is no longer possible to speak authentically about, from, against, or toward any symbolic reference point. It's completely untethered. A utopian dream used to be something dangerous. Now it appears before us and immediately shatters into infinite shards of pop culture and meta-meta-meta-self-awareness that can't find a firm foothold in anything.

The mountains are still there but they are no longer a reason for us to do anything. There is no way to stably say what we should or should not do with the mountains, in relation to the mountains.

I don't understand this either. How is this not reality? I don't see how integration of new concepts seemingly "obstructing" "reality" is any different than what existed prior to modernity. I also feel like the term reality isn't made quite clear by what's been said in this thread. and there is also some distinction to be made about our neuroscience as human beings, i.e., how is it that we ACTUALLY function and perceive the world, is it itself obstructed.
Idk this all seems far too vague. I want studies and stable theories proving or at least suggesting verification for what has been said. Is it true that we view things different now? can we actually prove it? so on and so forth.

same guy
also, isn't this normal?
I like this response because it seems to just refer to basic systems of meaning/reference/symbolism and cultures constructing them based more so of consistency or efficiency than anything else. Okay, but as the comment progresses Im lost at the sentence
>Now it appears before us and immediately shatters into infinite shards of pop culture and meta-meta-meta-self-awareness that can't find a firm foothold in anything.
and
>There is no way to stably say what we should or should not do with the mountains, in relation to the mountains.
why isn't it that it has shifted to a plurality?
I don't consider a plurality as something untethered. It could be a structured plurality. Couldn't one choose what to do with the mountains based off an analysis of its consistency with reference to whatever system their culture supposes? I still don't see how that ability is lost. The only thing lost is dogmatism; cultures now have the ability to shift and analyze a multiple symbolic procedures and pick one that may be most consistent, efficient, relatively normative, etc.
Idk, does any of that make sense?

>does any of that make sense
Yes. See the first reply in this thread. Baudrillard is a slightly more sexy adult version of edgy teenage nihilism.

the most edifying anecdote about Baudrillard is when he visited NY in the 80's a couple years after he had become the latest greatest meme in the fine art community and he told the assembled artistes at a talk he gave in that city that they had all completely misunderstood him

where to start?

What about instinct? The deeply chthonic ones that existed before culture, words, and symbols? Isn't that a reference point?

The thing about plurality is that that emergence of a plurality is the exact point of untethering from authentic symbolic relations in a society. A culture's uniqueness and singularity in their relation to something like a mountain is eliminated when western rationality consumes it within frameworks that need to produce every more analysis, so that everything can be made coherent and knowable. You are given a choice within this "plurality" of perspectives, but it is actually a false choice. The calculative, rational analysis of an indigenous culture's spiritual connection to their land immediately robs it of any authentic meaning. The analysis just becomes circulated in the pool of ever increasing information. For example, somebody in a university could be teaching a class about revolutionary communist politics, while in the building across from them students are taught neoliberal economic theories. But for baudrillard there is no longer any meaningful distinction between the follower of capitalism and the socialist anymore. They both support and are complicit with late capitalism's logic and epistemic reasoning, regardless of whether or not they claim to support it on the surface.

Simulacra and Simulation ofc

Don't start with S&S, you will likely find it incomprehensible without previous knowledge of Baudrillard's ideas. Start with Symbolic Exchange and Death, but make sure that before reading that you have a workable knowledge of Marxism and Saussurean Linguistics, as both are necessary for really understanding the things he's responding to. After SE&D, read The Perfect Crime and/or Fatal Strategies

Just watch anything by David Lynch, you'll get the idea

I’ll probably find it incomprehensible anyways desu

david lynch never refers to baudrillard

Let me try to understand this.

Because of the media and communications, there is another reality, the information "reality" and we can no longer pinpoint actual reality (culture, communities, art) because the world moves on the track of the current ocean of information.

Is that it? Sorry if not, I am brainlet.

You'd get a better impression watching The Matrix tbqh

>have a workable knowledge of Marxism and Saussurean Linguistics, as both are necessary for really understanding

I didnt want to read Baudrylord anyway.

>How is this not reality?
A map is just a model of the world. Science is just a model of the world. All of these artificial constructs we create are just models. When you follow a map, your putting your faith in the map as a model of our physical world to be accurate enough to guide you from A to B. What Baudrillard is essentially saying is that we've entered an era where there are so many models that we can no longer tell where the models end and reality beings. Now, this isn't a problem if all of the models are perfectly accurate, but they obviously are not. So now we have different people following different models and nobody can really be sure where the models end and reality begins, or which models are more accurate. This is really the crux of what most people call post-modernism.

but hasnt humanity always been following a map? there is no distinction from the "maps" and reality. Ever. We've been pack animals that evolved by following and imitating. Creating based on other things, reiterating.

>there is no distinction from the "maps" and reality. Ever.

i hope this is a troll

>evolved by following
wanna know how i know that youve never read memetzsche

>but hasnt humanity always been following a map
No? There was a point where nobody anywhere had any maps and the conception of the world these people had was completely different than yours. They had no idea what the world really looked like from a top-down perspective, their only reference was the actual reality they had perceived. And gradually we moved to an era where some people had maps, but they were very rough and inaccurate and even then most people would probably never end up look at it. You could say "oh Rome is 500 miles south and Paris is 300 miles east" but you'd have no idea what France or Italy actually looked like from space. Maybe you'd seen a model like pic-related and that was your conception of what it looked like, but that's hardly accurate.

Even modern maps you see today are often not 1:1 accurate. Many make Africa smaller than it actually is and the Northern Hemisphere larger because it's more relevant. And if that's the only map you'd ever seen that's what your conception of the world is, you'd assume that's reality when in fact it's not. If two people have seen two competing maps then you've got two people with two completely different ideas of what reality actually is. Baudrillard is saying that there are so many different maps that everyone has a different idea of what reality is, and that the process that's caused this to happen is now out of our hands. We all have different maps in our head of what the world is, so we don't even know where to begin in trying to pin down actual reality because nobody can agree. So we're stuck in this accelerating process where different maps keep getting made and we can't stop it, let alone know what the next maps will look like.

I bet your first kiss was a tv screen

Based

You are referring to literal maps, there are other types of maps: cultural, economic, sociopolitical. Yes there wa a point zero, but people moved on from it, and learned from explorers and teachers. Everything has been "mapped out". There were of course inventions creations and discoveries, but we build on top of those, reality keeps changing. That only seems natural to me.

Not a troll, and I've only read Thus Spoke Zarathustra and explanatory texts on "Memetzche" and why the fuck would that be a gauge?

The person you originally responded to was talking about literal maps as an example of a model of reality, which is what Baudrillard talks about when he refers to information and reality as a dichotomy. Everything hasn't been "mapped" out, you've completely ignored everything I've said to continue on with your pointless sophistry. Nobody wants to talk to someone that isn't constructive, certainly not me.

>“Dude, the Gulf War didn’t happen for real, because media reported about it xD“

I really hope this is bait

Isn't this the guy who wrote the Matrix and likes to talk about tv shows?

He did a terrible job writing the sequels.

No. The Matrix was partially inspired by his works, that’s it

How's the book version of the story?

Shite. There are basically no fight scenes at all.

>How is this not reality?

>A map is just a model of the world. Science is just a model of the world. All of these artificial constructs we create are just models. When you follow a map, your putting your faith in the map as a model of our physical world to be accurate enough to guide you from A to B. What Baudrillard is essentially saying is that we've entered an era where there are so many models that we can no longer tell where the models end and reality beings. Now, this isn't a problem if all of the models are perfectly accurate, but they obviously are not. So now we have different people following different models and nobody can really be sure where the models end and reality begins, or which models are more accurate. This is really the crux of what most people call post-modernism.

this is the most succinct description of pomo philosophy i've ever seen and makes more sense than 90% of the self-masturbatory published writings hitherto

Well that explains why no one talks about it. The Holleywood version is better than the real stuff.

Does the book version at least have better sex. Books can have a lot of sex because children don't read them. You can't have sex in the movies because children go to them.