Reality: Simulations - the Analytical Audacity of Jean Baudrillard
By Marc Estrin
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About this ebook
Given the exigencies of the time, Fomite offers a series of bound pamphlets on urgent political, social, cultural, and organizing issues from a radical, anti-capitalist viewpoint.
Marc Estrin
Marc Estrin is a cellist with the Vermont Philharmonic Orchestra and the Montpelier Chamber Orchestra. He also performs regularly with a string quartet. In addition, Mr. Estrin is an activist and novelist. Insect Dreams is his first novel. He and his wife live in Burlington, Vermont.
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Reality - Marc Estrin
Reality
This craziness of the 2016 election was not basically about Democrats and Republicans, hawks and doves, rich and poor, blacks and whites, women and men, experience and showmanship. What would Jean Baudrillard (intellectual terrorist
, the Darth Vader of postmodernism
, 1929-2007) say? – That it was about different understandings of Reality, and the various strategies of manipulating it.
His little book, Simulations, is 4x6
, large print, big margins 150 pages. Almost a pamphlet. But the thinking within is explosively audacious.
(Page numbers in parentheses will refer to Simulations. Unidentified indented quotes are from other Baudrillard texts. References upon request from mestrin@mac.com)
There are some key sections in Simulations, often quoted, which give a reader something to hang on to. One characterizes four stages in the changing function of signs. Read slowly and take this in:
1. The sign is a reflection of a basic reality
, as is common in scientific or referential language.
2. The sign masks and perverts a basic reality
- As when ideology stems from false consciousness which prevents people from seeing their true alienation or exploitation. The Frankfurt School writers have plenty to say about this.
3. The sign "masks the absence of a basic reality, as when iconoclasts fear of images of deity because they may lead people to suspect the absence of deity.
4. The sign bears no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
(11)
Here Baudrillard is thinking