Comment by iunoionnis on 05/02/2024 at 11:50 UTC

-35 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)

View submission: Was Jean Baudrillard just a parasite?

Didn’t the dude argue that the Persian gulf war wasn’t taking place? Lol, that’s all that’s taken place for the past two decades

Replies

Comment by pidedip at 05/02/2024 at 12:03 UTC

37 upvotes, 2 direct replies

i would actually recommend his essay (or collection of three essays) on the gulf war. the 'did not take place' argument isn't some dumb denial of reality. it is about how war is simulated by media representation. ultimately, there was no war, only a massacre. you could make the case for what is happening in gaza at the moment: there has never been a 'war' or 'conflict' between israel and palestine; there has only ever been the genocide of palestinians by the israeli state since its formation.

Comment by jliat at 05/02/2024 at 12:26 UTC

15 upvotes, 0 direct replies

He said the Gulf war wouldn't happen, and later that it never happened.

Simulacra and Simulation delineates the sign-order into four stages: (wiki)

[1] The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where people believe, and may even be correct to believe, that a sign is a "reflection of a profound reality" (pg 6), this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called "the sacramental order".

[2] The second stage is perversion of reality, where people come to believe that the sign is an unfaithful copy, which "masks and denatures" reality as an "evil appearance—it is of the order of maleficence". Here, signs and images do not faithfully reveal reality to us, but can hint at the existence of an obscure reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.

[3] The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the sign pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery", a regime of semantic algebra where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth.

[4] The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.

So nothing is real?

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IDT3MpSCKI[1] @ 1:52 !!!

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IDT3MpSCKI