In 1986, his visit to the United States (the homeland of the simulacrum) yielded a book-length essay, "America" - which was less theoretical than his earlier work, and looked attractive on a coffee table, besides. The dissemination of his jargon during the late 1980s corresponded with the rise of the VCR, the home PC, the video game and the modem. And the timing could not have been better. Society and information form an increasingly escalating feedback loop: Each "simulates" the other, until both finally "implode." All reality becomes virtual.Ībout a dozen years ago, Baudrillard's work started appearing in English translation with some regularity. Life is an effect - a byproduct - of television images, computer programs and market surveys. But with the total saturation of society by the media, cybernetics and mass production, the world has turned upside down. Out of the resulting conceptual wreckage, Baudrillard fashioned his theory of "the order of the simulacrum." To simplify a bit: Once, it made sense to think of signs as pointing to reality. They were sexiest when accelerated to high speeds and brought into collision. Ballard's characters brought to automobiles. He treated the ideas of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche with much the same attitude that J.G. From the mid-'60s through the mid-'80s, Jean Baudrillard was your standard ultra-hip, post-everythingist French intellectual, publishing a series of philosophical works on Desire, Revolution, Death and the Sign.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |