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A review by kev_nickells
Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard
Anyway - read this first when I was younger. I remember finding it a bit of an incomplete thought when I was younger but of course what I was missing is the way in which Baudrillard is an angry, politically well-heeled theorist staring aghast at the beginnings of Reaganism and neo-liberalism.
I love me an essay collection and this was such a thing. So it's broadly all about the symbolic in capital and society - a companion to Debord's society of the spectacle. But also strongly linked with that Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze sort of theory that turns psychoanalysis away from fecklessness. Thinking about it in 2022, in line with thoughts about fascism, it's an important critique - the recognition of the fallacies surrounding 'the real' (even if we don't go full Baudriallard 'desert of the real') turn the insistence of the 'real' from atavistic-fascistic circles into symbolic and dangerous [emph] capitalisation on facile realities. Or rather - the contested 'real' is most hopelessy out of sync with the reality of relations to stuff (culture, religion, each other etc).
I think I perhaps worried about the nihilism, or the capital-centric nature of this before - and to be sure, I'd mount some of those criticisms now, but I think there's a sense in which this is an important work, still, for thinking through our complex relationships with symbolism in culture and the 'ontologies' that we reflexively lean upon.
I love me an essay collection and this was such a thing. So it's broadly all about the symbolic in capital and society - a companion to Debord's society of the spectacle. But also strongly linked with that Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze sort of theory that turns psychoanalysis away from fecklessness. Thinking about it in 2022, in line with thoughts about fascism, it's an important critique - the recognition of the fallacies surrounding 'the real' (even if we don't go full Baudriallard 'desert of the real') turn the insistence of the 'real' from atavistic-fascistic circles into symbolic and dangerous [emph] capitalisation on facile realities. Or rather - the contested 'real' is most hopelessy out of sync with the reality of relations to stuff (culture, religion, each other etc).
I think I perhaps worried about the nihilism, or the capital-centric nature of this before - and to be sure, I'd mount some of those criticisms now, but I think there's a sense in which this is an important work, still, for thinking through our complex relationships with symbolism in culture and the 'ontologies' that we reflexively lean upon.