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dannymason_1's review
4.0
Rightly a cornerstone of modern theory and it was very rewarding to read it front to back even though I was familiar with most of the ideas already. It is tricky, but I found giving the first few pages a close reading was enough to get the core ideas understood inside out and after that the rest of the book went down much more smoothly.
sbenzell's review
4.0
Welcome to the desert of the real
I think there are two primary ways of viewing the spread and contest of ideas and concepts. The first is a “meme” model, where ideas are in Darwinian competition for survival, and the ideas best able to reproduce themselves (often by coopting the powerful) are those than win and spread. The second is an “Enlightenment” model, where ideas can be rationally contrasted and evaluated, and the ideas that are the best ultimately persuade and spread. I think fads are best described by the former, and discoveries in physics are best described by the latter, with most conceptual fights including elements of both.
Boudrillard, representing in some sense the height and perfection of a certain kind of ‘hard’ classical post-modernism, starts with the “meme” model and takes it to its furthest conclusion.
Disneyland exists to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral).
What does it mean to believe in only the “meme” model? Well, because all ideas are simply illusions, all equally true and untrue, it means that everyone everywhere is living in an illusion. This illusion completely controls our beliefs and actions. It has been said that “The Matrix” was directly inspired by this book of essays, and if so, that may be this works’ greatest contribution to culture. We see this both in Morpheus’ gnostic monologues at the beginning of the film, in the way that Neo’s rebellion is actually a pre-planned element necessary to the stability of the system, and also in the way that –by the end of the third film- we see that the machines themselves actually want to move to and live in the Matrix. That the elites who designed the prison eventually can think of nothing better to do than live there themselves.
It has also been said that in the original intended trilogy we would learn that Zion itself is just another level of the illusory reality. That in fact no escape from artificial reality was possible.
Because what, ultimately, is the function of the launching of satellites if not the institution of a model of universal gravitation, of stylization of which the lunar module is the perfect embryo?
You would think that such a hard core epistemological skepticism would lead the author to a sort of humility. Nothing of the sort. Instead, we get conspiracy theories, unsupported claims, laughable speculations. The “meme-complex” that has captured the world into a quiet (1970s) stability will go on advancing neoliberalism and injustice forever. How does he know this? Well, the bomb hasn’t gone off yet, and makes us fearful and trusting of technocrats, so it must be that the “real” point of nuclear weapons must be social control. The “real” nuclear disaster haunting society is that we will never have a nuclear disaster. (In fact, the author takes his hatred of neoliberalism to extraordinary extremes. For example, even to the point of saying that Fascism was evil, but an inevitable reaction to the even greater evil of global capital! [Essay on History, footnote 1])
Do you believe any of this? I don’t. I think its occasionally interesting poetic speculation. Sometimes there’s a hint of an interesting sociological speculation, something that could actually be empirically tested.
Is any given bombing in Italy the work of leftist extremists, or extreme-right provocation, or a centrist mise-en-scene to discredit all extreme terrorists and to shore up its own failing power, or again is it a police-inspired scenario and a form of blackmail to public security? All of this is simultaneously true
At its best the book seems like a prefiguration of the internet – social media in particular. An understanding of a pure idea-space, where everyone is constantly communicating to everyone else about speculative absurdities. What does a world look like, when the layers of conceptual reality get piled on higher and higher between meme-ers and ordinary lived experience? When memes reproduce and multiply and exchange DNA at hyper-dynamic speeds? When culture is 100% internationalized and 100% commodified and 100% saturated with ads? When every Marvel movie is just an advertisement for the next Marvel movie? And what happens when the metaphor -- that reality television means that TV is actually watching you -- becomes the reality – that social media means that our faked existences are the channel we actually are dialed to most of the time?
These are really fascinating questions when posed that way. But Boudrillard’s answers are tired and frankly boring – that this is just the perfection of the system, making all revolt and change even more impossible, Neolibralism, global capital, who’s really the crazy one, blah blah blah.
I am a nihilist…If being a nihilist, is carrying, to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems, this radical trait of derision and of violence, this challenge that the system is summoned to answer through its own death, then I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us.
I don’t recommend this book for answers – in fact, there’s a part of me that is viscerally disgusted by the sophistry entailed in writing an obscuritinist book, and then writing at the end “btw I’ve been lying to you the whole time.” (the author actually starts with a lie – a false quote by Ecclesiastes that “The simulacrum is never what hides the truth – it is the truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true. ” . If you’ll forgive me, I mimicked this by falsely attributing a quote of Boudrillard’s at the beginning of the essay. The quote in the essay, which follows a inverting discussion of Borges’ parable of the king who makes a map the size of the whole kingdom, is the much less interesting “The desert of the real itself. ” My quote is from “The Matrix” which you should definitely watch instead of reading this if you have the choice).
The postmodernists know the truth that progress happens within paradigms and that across paradigms better and worse can be hard to judge. They therefore advocate for an abolition of all paradigms (when honest, more commonly they argue for whatever counter-neoliberal paradigm is handy e.g. Marxism, radical feminism etc.). But this is the incorrect move. Rather, given the value of paradigms, we should treasure them all the more, and throw them out as only a last option.
I am curious about the questions Bourdrillard poses, but ultimately he doesn’t have the tools to answer the justly provocative questions he puts out.
P.S. This book is also pretty funny though. My favorite line was “Pleasure in the microscopic simulation that allows the real to pass into the hyperreal. (This is also somewhat the case in porno, which is fascinating more on a metaphysical than on a sexual level).” If we follow Nietzche, like Bourdrillard does, and take philosophy as the psychological history of philosophers, what does B’s weird sex hangups throughout the book tell us about him? Maybe he’s too neurotic to engage with reality any more, but can he really speak for everyone else?
I think there are two primary ways of viewing the spread and contest of ideas and concepts. The first is a “meme” model, where ideas are in Darwinian competition for survival, and the ideas best able to reproduce themselves (often by coopting the powerful) are those than win and spread. The second is an “Enlightenment” model, where ideas can be rationally contrasted and evaluated, and the ideas that are the best ultimately persuade and spread. I think fads are best described by the former, and discoveries in physics are best described by the latter, with most conceptual fights including elements of both.
Boudrillard, representing in some sense the height and perfection of a certain kind of ‘hard’ classical post-modernism, starts with the “meme” model and takes it to its furthest conclusion.
Disneyland exists to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral).
What does it mean to believe in only the “meme” model? Well, because all ideas are simply illusions, all equally true and untrue, it means that everyone everywhere is living in an illusion. This illusion completely controls our beliefs and actions. It has been said that “The Matrix” was directly inspired by this book of essays, and if so, that may be this works’ greatest contribution to culture. We see this both in Morpheus’ gnostic monologues at the beginning of the film, in the way that Neo’s rebellion is actually a pre-planned element necessary to the stability of the system, and also in the way that –by the end of the third film- we see that the machines themselves actually want to move to and live in the Matrix. That the elites who designed the prison eventually can think of nothing better to do than live there themselves.
It has also been said that in the original intended trilogy we would learn that Zion itself is just another level of the illusory reality. That in fact no escape from artificial reality was possible.
Because what, ultimately, is the function of the launching of satellites if not the institution of a model of universal gravitation, of stylization of which the lunar module is the perfect embryo?
You would think that such a hard core epistemological skepticism would lead the author to a sort of humility. Nothing of the sort. Instead, we get conspiracy theories, unsupported claims, laughable speculations. The “meme-complex” that has captured the world into a quiet (1970s) stability will go on advancing neoliberalism and injustice forever. How does he know this? Well, the bomb hasn’t gone off yet, and makes us fearful and trusting of technocrats, so it must be that the “real” point of nuclear weapons must be social control. The “real” nuclear disaster haunting society is that we will never have a nuclear disaster. (In fact, the author takes his hatred of neoliberalism to extraordinary extremes. For example, even to the point of saying that Fascism was evil, but an inevitable reaction to the even greater evil of global capital! [Essay on History, footnote 1])
Do you believe any of this? I don’t. I think its occasionally interesting poetic speculation. Sometimes there’s a hint of an interesting sociological speculation, something that could actually be empirically tested.
Is any given bombing in Italy the work of leftist extremists, or extreme-right provocation, or a centrist mise-en-scene to discredit all extreme terrorists and to shore up its own failing power, or again is it a police-inspired scenario and a form of blackmail to public security? All of this is simultaneously true
At its best the book seems like a prefiguration of the internet – social media in particular. An understanding of a pure idea-space, where everyone is constantly communicating to everyone else about speculative absurdities. What does a world look like, when the layers of conceptual reality get piled on higher and higher between meme-ers and ordinary lived experience? When memes reproduce and multiply and exchange DNA at hyper-dynamic speeds? When culture is 100% internationalized and 100% commodified and 100% saturated with ads? When every Marvel movie is just an advertisement for the next Marvel movie? And what happens when the metaphor -- that reality television means that TV is actually watching you -- becomes the reality – that social media means that our faked existences are the channel we actually are dialed to most of the time?
These are really fascinating questions when posed that way. But Boudrillard’s answers are tired and frankly boring – that this is just the perfection of the system, making all revolt and change even more impossible, Neolibralism, global capital, who’s really the crazy one, blah blah blah.
I am a nihilist…If being a nihilist, is carrying, to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems, this radical trait of derision and of violence, this challenge that the system is summoned to answer through its own death, then I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us.
I don’t recommend this book for answers – in fact, there’s a part of me that is viscerally disgusted by the sophistry entailed in writing an obscuritinist book, and then writing at the end “btw I’ve been lying to you the whole time.” (the author actually starts with a lie – a false quote by Ecclesiastes that “The simulacrum is never what hides the truth – it is the truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true. ” . If you’ll forgive me, I mimicked this by falsely attributing a quote of Boudrillard’s at the beginning of the essay. The quote in the essay, which follows a inverting discussion of Borges’ parable of the king who makes a map the size of the whole kingdom, is the much less interesting “The desert of the real itself. ” My quote is from “The Matrix” which you should definitely watch instead of reading this if you have the choice).
The postmodernists know the truth that progress happens within paradigms and that across paradigms better and worse can be hard to judge. They therefore advocate for an abolition of all paradigms (when honest, more commonly they argue for whatever counter-neoliberal paradigm is handy e.g. Marxism, radical feminism etc.). But this is the incorrect move. Rather, given the value of paradigms, we should treasure them all the more, and throw them out as only a last option.
I am curious about the questions Bourdrillard poses, but ultimately he doesn’t have the tools to answer the justly provocative questions he puts out.
P.S. This book is also pretty funny though. My favorite line was “Pleasure in the microscopic simulation that allows the real to pass into the hyperreal. (This is also somewhat the case in porno, which is fascinating more on a metaphysical than on a sexual level).” If we follow Nietzche, like Bourdrillard does, and take philosophy as the psychological history of philosophers, what does B’s weird sex hangups throughout the book tell us about him? Maybe he’s too neurotic to engage with reality any more, but can he really speak for everyone else?
cantordustbunnies's review
2.0
I can't help but feel that part of Baudrillard's fixation with and despair over a lack of reality may in part be due to his own attitudes and behaviors. His writing, while clearly intelligent, comes across more often than not as being highly affected. It is as though he is trying to bewilder the audience through deliberate obfuscation in order to construct a sense of prestige or even guru status. Postmodernists aren't kidding when they say that language is a weapon and is used by the strong to maintain their control, they are fixated on power. They openly attack those already in authority but sneakily don't openly admit that they themselves yearn to be in positions of cultural as well as political dominance and would have no qualms about using the same tactics they believe are all too real and bewail others for using. Baudrillard is no exception to other postmodernists in this regard. It is as though he is twisting himself into knots trying to figure out why he is dissatisfied without realizing that if he stopped posturing, stopped subscribing to these highly melodramatic, hyperbolic, avant-garde ideologies he would probably find the "real" that he is seeking. His writing can be wonderfully poetic but ultimately a lot of what he's really saying is downright silly. He was however incredibly beyond his time and speaks a lot about what is happening with the media and the internet before the internet even existed, which is a mark of genius. He has valid things to say about consumerism too, but so much of it is bogged down by his insufferably snotty style. I fully believe that Baudrillard is a genius and does have valuable insight, but I just sort of want to shake him and make him go to a therapeutic nature camp for a month and chop wood.