Baudrillard jean america. America by Jean Baudrillard 2019-01-22

Jean Baudrillard (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Consequently, Baudrillard began a radical critique of Marxism, one that would be repeated by many of his contemporaries who would also take a postmodern turn see Best and Kellner 1991 and 1997. The marathon is a form of demonstrative suicide, suicide as advertising: it is running to show you are capable of getting every last drop of energy out of yourself, to prove it… to prove what? This affiliation with Utopie only lasted into the early 1970s, but it may have helped produce in Baudrillard a desire to work on the margins, to stand aside from current trends and fads, and to develop his own theoretical positions. In exchange, we might pass on to them our liberal virus, our compulsion for objects and images, media and communication, a virus, in our case, which devastates civil society. Television shows and films are only animated by no less than actors devoid of authenticity and meaning. These myths, these strong ideas, are exhausted, he claims, and henceforth a postmodern era of banal eclecticism, inertial implosion, and eternal recycling of the same become defining features. He also argues that Marxism does not provide a sufficiently radical critique of capitalist societies and alternative critical discourses and perspectives. He retired from academia in 1987 to write books and travel until his death in 2007.

Jean Baudrillard (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

For the desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance. It does not require an extraordinary effort of political thinking, except by way of recovery, to reassert the importance of political forms whose disappearance has been hoped for in vain. His America is a country without persons — not one is introduced — and for that matter without people, these having been absorbed into his theories of hyperreality and simulation. Faced with the failure of the May 1968 student revolts in France, Baudrillard concluded that resistance and critique had become impossible because consumer technology—first television and later the internet in all its forms—was immersive rather than alienating. Why not, surely, all of these, including California? His polemics against Marxism were fuelled by the belief that sign value and the code were more fundamental than such traditional elements of political economy as exchange value, use value, production and so on in constituting contemporary society. Yet this active manipulation of signs is not equivalent to postulating an active human subject that could resist, redefine, or produce its own signs, thus Baudrillard fails to develop a genuine theory of agency. Yet determination itself is aleatory in a non-linear world where it is impossible to chart causal mechanisms in a situation in which individuals are confronted with an overwhelming flux of images, codes, and models, any of which may shape an individual's thought or behavior.

Verso

That is, we are doing the same thing as Google, only within the framework of one subject. For Baudrillard, modern societies are organized around the production and consumption of commodities, while postmodern societies are organized around simulation and the play of images and signs, denoting a situation in which codes, models, and signs are the organizing forms of a new social order where simulation rules. As he was quoted on following: Astral America. The moral condemnation and the sacred union against terrorism are directly proportional to the prodigious jubilation felt at having seen this global superpower destroyed. Or if he does consider it he decides it's not worth mentioning. Fixed distinctions between social groupings and ideologies implode and concrete face-to-face social relations recede as individuals disappear in worlds of simulation — media, computers, virtual reality itself. In his mid-1970s work, however, Baudrillard posits another divide in history as radical as the rupture between premodern symbolic societies and modern ones.

Verso

He emphasizes on the unreality and shallowness of the American culture. . In Baudrullard's America he uses Disneyland as such an example, saying that Disneyland is simply a microcosm of a more tender and exciting America 2. Both have the theoretical jargon, impenetrable passages and lack of care for readability. تازه اون ده درصد هم دلائلش نامعلومه - یعنی حرفی را زده ولی معلوم نیست چرا من باید آن حرف را قبول کنم. Priority is with the network, not with the subscribers to the network. This probably encouraged Baudrillard to travel to America and see deeply for himself the status of a grand nation that is continually moving and upgrading itself to be more secured and independent.

‘America’ by Jean Baudrillard

He brings up the idea of France's long political and cultural history. His book America provides us the view on how an intellectual personality like Jean Baurillard sees America from different perspective. His views in America are something of a reformulation of the Old World-New World split, that America is a purposefully naive lived out artifice, like the still continuing ideal of American exceptionalism. There is no relationship between them. His complaint about television was bang-on. And yet more cynical anti-sociologists are encouraged to enjoy Baudrillard's fictions, his experimental discourse, his games, and play. There's The first two thirds is a set of hilarious cultural collision fish out of water vignettes directed by Jarmusch or someone.

Richard Poirier reviews ‘America’ by Jean Baudrillard, translated by Chris Turner, ‘America Observed’ by Ronald Wells and ‘American Journals’ by Albert Camus, translated by Hugh Levick · LRB 16 February 1989

That even in war one can observe their presence of mind is always intact. This ultra-leftist phase of Baudrillard's itinerary would be short-lived, however, though in Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard produces one of his most important and dramatic provocations. Ours, unreal and speculative, lacking even the notion of production, profit and progress, is no longer modern, but post-modern. Previously, in banal strategies, the subject believed itself to be more masterful and sovereign than the object. That anybody have a choice between buying material things because it is a simulation of freedom.

Jean Baudrillard

That being said, I have to disagree with Baudrillard's opinions to a degree. Culture, politics — and sexuality too — are seen exclusively in terms of the desert, which here assumes the status of a primal scene…Even the body, by an ensuing effect of undernourishment, takes on a transparent form, lightness near to complete disappearance. Baudrillard's work cuts across the disciplines and promotes cross-disciplinary thought. Money is dirty; that you must admit. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. The text opens with a Preface that condenses his attempt to provide a significantly different approach to society and culture.

Jean Baudrillard: America

Contradictions do not bother Baudrillard, for indeed he affirms them. For Baudrillard by the end of the 1990s with the collapse of communism, the era of the strong ideas, of a conflicted world of revolution and universal emancipation, is over. در حالت اول که واضحه اتلاف عمرش در حالت دوم از اولی بدتره چون آن چیزی رو که می دونه نمی تونه منتقل کنه مترجم در پشت جلد نوشته این کتاب به گمان بسیاری جذاب ترین و قابل فهم ترین کتاب بودریاره. This mode of highly abstract analysis, however, occludes more specific historical determinants that would analyze how technological rationality is constructed and functioned and how and why it misfires. The masses no longer have a distinct status of their own. The question is whether it's worth your time and effort to figure out what is what.

Richard Poirier reviews ‘America’ by Jean Baudrillard, translated by Chris Turner, ‘America Observed’ by Ronald Wells and ‘American Journals’ by Albert Camus, translated by Hugh Levick · LRB 16 February 1989

One of the comparisons made in the blurb and the introduction is to de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. The lyrical nature of pure circulation. Frankly, not many of us, say, in the Northeast, Midwest, the South, think deeply of the desert when we think of America. Influenced by Mauss' theory of the gift and countergift, Baudrillard claimed that pre-capitalist societies were governed by laws of symbolic exchange rather than production and utility. Combining semiological studies, Marxian political economy, and sociology of the consumer society, Baudrillard began his life-long task of exploring the system of objects and signs which forms our everyday life. Night of gambling sunlit on all sides; the glittering darkness of these rooms in the middle of the desert.