Jean Baudrillard (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Baudrillard argues that in Bataille's claim that expenditure and excess is connected with sovereignty, Mauss's descriptions of the social prestige of gift-giving in premodern society, Jarry's theater that ridicules French culture, and Saussure's anagrams, there is a break with the values of capitalist exchange and production, or the production of meaning in linguistic exchange. However, while institutions of confinement are held over from a previous time, the practice of confining the mad constitutes a break with the past. Likewise, in a digital era, Baudrillard claims that history has come to an end and reality has been killed by virtualization, as the human species prepares itself for a virtual existence. He arguest that it is better to leave these alone, that these are human creations that must be allowed to carry on their own dynamic. For Foucault, the identity of power and knowledge also contains an epistemological philosophical meaning, in the sense that what counts as knowledge always depends on social relations. Baudrillard finds a prime example of this strategy with graffiti artists who experiment with symbolic markings and codes in order to suggest communication while blocking it, and who sign their inscriptions with pseudonyms instead of recognizable names. Unlike deconstruction, which focuses upon the functional structures of a text, hermeneutics seeks to arrive at an agreement or consensus as to what the text means, or is about.
In addition, his postmodern universe is one of hyperreality in which entertainment, information, and communication technologies provide experiences more intense and involving than the scenes of banal everyday life, as well as the codes and models that structure everyday life. Habermas It is thus clear from this exposition that there are at least three different directions taken by Postmodernim, relating to the theories of Lyotard, Baudrillard and Jameson. Such a turn would mean deepening and distorting the technological essence, not destroying it or leaving it behind. Unlike Habermas and Chomsky, Foucault does not believe in a universal Truth, Human Nature, or Justice. Page reference is to the 1994 translation. Fredric Jameson Just as we have lost touch with the reality of our life, we have also moved away from the reality of the goods we consume.
Baudrillard thus argues that we have entered a new era that is beyond the modern, and this constitutes a break with an earlier era — much like the break between the premodern and the modern. The Cold War stalemate was long taken by Baudrillard as establishing a frozen history in which no significant change could take place. Technology thus replaces capital in this story and semiurgy interpreted by Baudrillard as proliferation of images, information, and signs replaces production. Baudrillard celebrated the coming of the new millennium with a recycling of some his old ideas on cloning, the end of history, and the disappearance of the real in a series of lectures collected as The Vital Illusion 2000. In another of his writing, Baudrillard notes that Disney may be surprised if he wakes up in the 15 th century, or some other time. Where Kant founds the representational unity of space and time upon the formal unity of consciousness Kant 1787, 135-137 , difference re-distributes intuitions of past, present, and future, fracturing consciousness into multiple states not predicable of a single subject.
Jean Baudrillard Quotes (Author of Simulacra and Simulation)
The loss of a continuous meta-narrative therefore breaks the subject into heterogeneous moments of subjectivity that do not cohere into an identity. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference shine out spontaneously in your smile. However, where Heidegger situates Nietzsche within the limits of metaphysics, Vattimo joins Heidegger's ontological hermeneutics with Nietzsche's attempt to think beyond nihilism and historicism with his concept of eternal return. The understanding that an objective truth does not exist has invariably led the accent of Postmodernism to fall on subjectivity. Science, however, plays the language game of denotation to the exclusion of all others, and in this respect it displaces narrative knowledge, including the meta-narratives of philosophy. But after the 1968 student rebellions failed—that is, after Marxist revolution failed to materialize in France—he began to wonder whether certain very modern social phenomena, particularly the media, were altering the ordinary experience of politics in such a way that revolution had become impossible.
That you are capable of finishing. A mask of a profound reality; 3. Chris Turner London: Verso Books, 1988. In Marx, on the other hand, we have an analysis of the fetishism of commodities Marx 1867, 444—461 where objects lose the solidity of their use value and become spectral figures under the aspect of exchange value. Reducing complex events like wars to categories like simulation or hyperreality illuminates the virtual and high-tech dimension to media events, but erases all their concrete determinants. Underlying the fiction of modernity is a sense of temporality that excludes the elements of chance and contingency in play at every moment. For Heidegger, the will to power is the eternal recurrence as becoming, and the permanence of becoming is the terminal moment of the metaphysics of presence.
The truth was that it was liberalism that depended on a bizarre set of theoretical constructs designed to establish an absolute yet limited political power that would be devoted, in the end, to the ever greater expansion of market-based hyperreality. Bataille's model was the sun that freely expended its energy without asking anything in return. Vattimo also finds this new attitude toward modernity in Heidegger's sense of overcoming metaphysics, insofar as he suggests that overcoming the enframing lies with the possibility of a turn within the enframing itself. Influenced by Lefebvre, Barthes, and s series of French thinkers whose influence will be discussed below, Baudrillard undertook serious work in the field of social theory, semiology, and psychoanalysis in the 1960s and published his first book The System of Objects in 1968 1996 , followed by a book on The Consumer Society in 1970 1998 , and For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign in 1972 1981. The first example of this research is Histoire de la folie à l'age classique, published in 1961, the full version of which was published in English as History of Madness in 2006.
Postmodernism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
The French, for example, work with concepts developed during the structuralist revolution in Paris in the 1950s and early 1960s, including structuralist readings of Marx and Freud. Liberal political economy and democratic mechanisms of government would advance—but only because they found no resistance. He criticizes Nietzsche's Dionysianism as a compensatory gesture toward the loss of unity in Western culture that, in pre-modern times, was provided by religion. Where the expert knows what he knows and what he doesn't know, the philosopher knows neither, but poses questions. Instead of calling for experimentation with counter-strategies and functional structures, he sees the heterogeneity and diversity in our experience of the world as a hermeneutical problem to be solved by developing a sense continuity between the present and the past. Thus, it is difficult to decide whether Baudrillard is best read as science fiction and pataphysics, or as philosophy, social theory, and cultural metaphysics, and whether his post-1970s work should be read under the sign of truth or fiction. The way out of this collapse is the moment of eternal recurrence, when we affirm the necessity of error in the absence of foundations.
Jean Baudrillard Quotes (Author of Simulacra and Simulation)
Wages too bear no rational relation to one's work and what one produces but to one's place within the system 1993a: 19ff. Politics requires the action of a defined community to decide upon and pursue what it wants. For Baudrillard 2000 , cloning is connected to the fantasy of immortality, to defeating the life-cycle. The Nietzschean method of genealogy, in its application to modern subjectivity, is another facet of philosophical postmodernism. Paul Patton Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Michel Foucault's application of genealogy to formative moments in modernity's history and his exhortations to experiment with subjectivity place him within the scope of postmodern discourse.
For Jarry: pataphysics is the science of the realm beyond metaphysics… It will study the laws which govern exceptions and will explain the universe supplementary to this one; or, less ambitiously, it will describe a universe which one can see — must see perhaps — instead of the traditional one… Definition: pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments Jarry 1963: 131. Hovering between nostalgia and nihilism, Baudrillard at once exterminates modern ideas e. The book marks a turning away from the more sociological discourse of his earlier works to a more philosophical and literary discourse. The first inscriptions are relations of kinship and filiation structuring primitive societies, often involving the marking and scarring of human bodies. Foucault focuses upon the moment of transition, as modern reason begins to take shape in a confluence of concepts, institutions, and practices, or, as he would say, of knowledge and power. Developing these ideas, Baudrillard sketched a fundamental dividing line in history between symbolic societies — i. He describes his text as a combination of two very different language games, that of the philosopher and that of the expert.
But at this stage of his work, Baudrillard falls prey to a technological determinism and semiological idealism which posits an autonomous technology and play of signs generating a society of simulation which creates a postmodern break and the proliferation of signs, spectacles, and simulacra. Emotional outpourings, solidarity, cosmopolitan emotiveness, multi-media pathos: all soft values harshly condemned by the Nietzschean, Marxo-Freudian age. In both cases, he argues, what is to be overcome is modernity, characterized by the image that philosophy and science are progressive developments in which thought and knowledge increasingly appropriate their own origins and foundations. This affiliation with Utopie only lasted into the early 1970s, but it may have helped produce in Baudrillard a desire to work on the margins, to stand aside from current trends and fads, and to develop his own theoretical positions. This is a power of thought, which Foucault says is the ability of human beings to problematize the conditions under which they live.
