Baudrillard: yea or nea?No seriously where do start with this guy? Do I need any secret knowledge beforehand?
>>24684985From what I know the essay America is where to start.
>>24684985Simulacra and Simulation is a worldview changing book. though the main concept in itself isn't revolutionary it is a groundbreaking read, particularly when put next to the deleuzo-derridan-lacanian-foucauldian halfwit slop of the same era
>>24685159lvnar dvst trvth bomb
>>24685159adding to this, his other three major works Symbolic Exchange and Death, System of Objects and Consumers Society are also very illuminating reads. Symbolic Exchange and Death is a bit more intricate, but if you get acquainted with those first three it'll be easier to tackle. Then you can move on to his other collection of various short essays/articles, his road trip book on america. He's the most illuminating cultural critique of the second half of the 20th century (Christopher Lasch would be another one, but not as good) and his writings are very clear and accessible to anybody
>>24685181Thank you. I have simulation and simulacra at hand, i tried reading it once but I don’t have it in my native tongue, so it was too daunting for me at that time, but I’m giving it another try.
>>24685159it is just heidegger's question concerning technology imo>>24685135this is why reading america is better to get into baudrillard specifically
>>24685159to me Deleuze/Guattarri are the same kind of schizo kino as Baudrillard, just not as smart
Consumer Society and Simulacra are the ones I would suggest.
>television used to imitate reality>now reality imitates television
>>24685283That might not be a fair comparison. It is true they all drew from the same or highly similar source material so in that respect there are going to be more similarities. With Baudrillard it's hard to walk away thinking anything other than you engaged with a man who brought the big 3 to their endpoints. From what I've read of D&G they seem to be trying to avoid this and are definitely more of a creative force than Baudrillard's cynicism. Baudrillard is a frankly astounding case study of someone who devised a system that can seemingly validate all of the influences it drew from, while still allowing the participant to engage in each individually and allows for several mixtures. The cost of this is that the participant engages in Baudrillard's paradox, to my knowledge any attempt to solve it just increases the scale of it, something he himself acknowledges. Deleuze seemed to depart from Baudrillard significantly on desire and the nature of reality, at the least he was far less cynical and likely left a system behind that encourages new thought and creativity, it's hard to say which is 'smarter' or 'better' but rather they both designed systems to replicate themselves and both have capacity for new thought integration.
>>24685346By smarter I just meant that time keeps proving him right, he's the only one out of the french guys whose works actually had predictive validity - the rest just seem like Frankfurt-school-esque copers in comparison. But I still enjoy Deleuze/Guattari just for how out there A Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus are, even if it's largely nonsense I still find it creatively stimulating.
>>24685423>But I still enjoy Deleuze/Guattari just for how out there A Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus are, even if it's largely nonsense I still find it creatively stimulating.But that's my main concern with it. It's philo-poesy, it's a cool book to have read if you want to shine in conversations but it's not actually intellectually grandiose like baudrillard is
>>24685159>Simulacra and Simulation is a worldview changing book. though the main concept in itself isn't revolutionaryYou have it backwards. The main concept blew my mind, though nothing particular in the book moved me.
>>24685454>The main concept blew my mindI'm saying that it's not a revolutionary idea, Baudrillard just condensed a very intuitive hunch
you don't read Baudrillard, you read ABOUT Baudrillardhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkhaBDY3nz4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJfurfb5_kwMarshall McLuhan and Guy Debord are helpful on ramps
>>24685423He speculated in one of his works that the death drive would take over all economic thought at some point, regardless of what any given individual purports. The death meets death detonation cycle would inevitably lead to increasingly extreme hypotheses.
>>24686150From the transparency of evil book he made several claims that were wrong:>elimination of genders, crime, classes, hierarchies, significant historical events and rupturesHe sort of implied everything would become this synthetic perfection and nothing would be allowed to break out of it. In a dystopic sense, but still. I think we are beginning to see the start of pre-crime tech, and maybe he would’ve been right if the globalists had won. But now we’re headed more into polarization, class division and war. Transgender rights are dying in many parts of the world as well. This sort of reality where everything loses difference and becomes homogeneous didn’t seem to fully materialize.
>>24686376It was either Grundrisse or German Ideology, Marx makes a comment that if the balance of any given nation's production shift from manufacturing to service then production for unproductive consumption would be viewed as just as good as production for productive consumption provided capital is replicating. This in and of itself was a paradox he couldn't reconcile, and none of his opponents were able to do so either. This is tantamount to saying that at some point any given country would have a majority of unproductive labor. The higher the percentage the more uniform all labor becomes, if you work a wage service job then your boss likely does the same, and even the owner of the company is basically doing the same. You could in theory have a country where 99% of the eligible labor pool in unproductive and only 1% of the population qualifies as a traditional bourgeois while the remaining 99% don't qualify as traditional proletariat. This forces the system to nationalize companies as assets to the state for the perpetuation of the system of government in terms of owning production but the labor pool are reduced to terminals for the vestiges of what remains. The system upon realization will begin to circulate money to the terminals so they can fulfill a function, this is a cycle where there are no winners since more money has to be printed each time.Take a domestic farmer for instance, they play by the system and maybe raise crops that have both domestic and international use. At some point protectionism sets in and limits on international are imposed, now the farmer loses money. The government has to come in and print more and give it to them. Prices don't just go up for one person. Eventually the largest firms with the highest government ownership simply own them. This also affects the tech industry and just about anything else. For the unproductive labor there is just a terminal waiting for more money to be circulated and distributed to them, except each time this happens the unproductive labor pool grows.The end result is always good ole fashioned banana style money printing and everytime it's tried the outcome is the same.
