baudrillard

jrey1981

Just thought I'd post to see if anyone has read any of baudrillard's theory?

I was thinking about it again recently after reading about his death in The Guardian.

He is well-known for his theory on the simulacrum and saying 'The Gulf War didn't happen'.

I happen to agree with the simulacrum theory and would be interested to hear others' views.

Zillah

Baudrillard's hyper-reality is a wonderful tool for analysing culture. We studied him last year in college. Didn't hear he had died, pity...

The line 'The Gulf War didn't happen' is very misleading; makes him sound like a conspiracy nut. He believes it didn't happen as far as the West is concerned. We saw pictures of it, heard reports and stories, but we didn't see the war, only an artificial recreation of it.

Spectator#1

I haven't read much of him yet, I do intend to though. That whole simulacrum/sumulacra thing sounds a lot like Plato's doxai though, am I right?

Zillah

I'm not sure of the "doxai" reference, but I suspect you're refering to Plato's notion that the world we experience is only a shadow of the real world.

In which case they're related, but in a way opposing. Baudrillard generally asserts that there is an objective reality, this is the real world, the world of energy and matter around us, but that cultural recreations of this can become hyper-real objects that never really existed and that are taken to be real. Like a drink that is "Fizzy Winter Berry" flavour. It doesn't occur to someone that there is no "berry" in this drink and that theres no such things as a "Fizzy Winter" variety of berry. Plato goes off on his mad perfect forms outside space and time. Baudrillard is much more practical.

Disclaimer: This is of course by no means the only stuff that Baudrillard went into, I did only study him for a semester.

Spectator#1

Not to drag this off-topic but I read Plato's 'Cave' allegory differently. As far as I understood it, he was referring to the need for human beings, living in ignorance of eternity - not matter how much they know about the world and themselves - to recognise this ignorance. I thought that's what the whole 'turning towards the light' thing was about. When we recognise our ignorance and relative insignificance in the world we can allow the ordering force or reason to guide us through our lives, rather than blind hubris.

I know the explanation you gave there doesn't exactly clash with that, but it's important to point out, otherwise Plato ends up sounding like he's making an onto-epistemological claim.

I was talking about his discussion of the uniquely human ability to lose touch with reality through ignorance and ignore the ordering powers that the logos imbues us with. Like in Gorgias, as Socrates argues with the three generations of Sophists, you can see a degeneration in self-understanding as you move from Gorgias to Polus to Callicles - it's a progression from wisdom to the appearance of wisdom, Callicles has inherited a distorted world and re-distorted it again for himself.

As far as I understood it, Plato's discussion of the forms is more of a symbolic elucidation of our ability to percieve and strive towards perfection through our actions in the world, to distinguish beauty, truth, goodness, justice etc... It's a lot more practical than you give it credit for in that sense. He's basically saying that as humans, there are actual standards that we can live by, rather than justifying bad actions with relativistic oratorical arguments.

I know Baudrillard might not agree with some of that stuff there, but I thought that Plato's distinction between substantive lives, ordered by reason and truth and the untrue, fractured existence that such as Callicles created for himself would agree with a lot of what Baudrillard is getting at, no?