Rick Roderick on Baudrillard - Fatal Strategies [full length]

in the final law lecture on the self under siege we will discuss the the work of Jean Baudrillard French social theorist actually that now is a misnomer since one of Baudrillard thesis theses is the disappearance of the social Baudrillard is perhaps the most important theorist that can be characterized as postmodern and odd I have spent a lot of time in fact in a previous lecture series discussing the postmodern I'm going to give a very brief characterization of it and then discuss our Baudrillard relationship to it the self under siege in modernity has always presumed that there was a self to be under siege but in the view of Baudrillard society has reached a point at which it has literally been overcome by its technology and the new and important issues aren't about things like the non-believer are the non offender but about the non person in the world of Baudrillard social relations have disappeared between humans because humans have begun to disappear in fact baudrillard thinks that reality itself is in the process of disappearing the real what has been learned and understood under the name of the real all these outrageous things I've just said are worked out in a brilliant series of books which draw a lot of their power from many of the phenomenon we see around us so one way to discuss baudrillard is to run through some of these phenomena what baudrillard is doing is basically to trace the symptoms and tendencies of the trajectory of the postmodern if we were really in a postmodern society we wouldn't still be discussing things like the self under siege are the real they would simply have disappeared there we would be in a way transparently communicating one with another as in an earlier example when I talked about the stock market crashing due to the computer rationality well if we had really reached the postmodern in its fullest sense the way Baudrillard uses it it would be the computers unplugging us and not the reverse the postmodern is a blurring of the lines between human beings and machines a blurring of the line between reality and image it is a society or I can't even really use that word anymore it is a world if you will like a grouping of the world in which reality is simply that which can be simulated xeroxed copied that is one of his first theses it's in a book called simulations it's a very interesting thesis Baudrillard argues that this process is that one of the central things is the way in which we that that's changed as fundamentally and has helped to bring our relations as humans to a close I mean in a way baudrillard sees himself as a post-apocalyptic writer for baudrillard the apocalypse has already occurred it wasn't religious or anything it was not atomic bombs at some point in the development of Technology human beings ceased to be the reason of things and things took on their own reasons technological things let me describe this this a concept of simulation just a little bit though Beaudry arts definition of the real itself is that which can be simulated xeroxed and copied so whether you're talking about a human body where you can make a holograph of it or you're talking about the bible which you can Xerox or whether you're talking about the sexual act which can be simulated either through you know repetitive pornographic films are in a very near future it will be able to be simulated with virtual reality where you'll wear a full body suit and make love to your ego ideal thus making it pointless to to search out all the Freudian implications you can just pick your ego ideal punch it into the laser beam program slip into the virtual reality suit thus rendering that relation even that intimate relation sexual relation technological simulate able reproducible to infinity now all this sounds wild crazy and I don't want it to sound wild and crazy I want it to sound the way that I think that it really should say on and that's as though we could place ourselves and I've used this analogy before but I will again as though we could place in ours ourselves in that era right before the atomic energy and television before we knew all the myriad changes that they would make in the way that we were in the way we interact and so on well we're in a period now where I've already mentioned and these are the phenomena at Baudrillard examines with the most care in incredible information overloads with information moving at incredible speed and even to the youngest children I talked about how children used to learn morality from their parents and now I think that Super Mario Brothers they spend much more time with Super Mario Brothers and are much more like emotionally involved with Nintendo than they are with their aunts their uncles their mothers and their fathers I asked one of my children why are you yelling at a machine when he began to buying his Nintendo and he looked at me as though I were a being from another world and because of that there is a postmodern trajectory I am from another world I'm still as it were caught in the modern he's not why not be emotional with the machine his peers are machine-like we've already discussed that I mean in fact what he sees on the Nintendo screen is his thrill of the day that's the most active he's seen any simulated image that day now simulation in this society didn't just come from nowhere the society of simulations and of spectacles Baudrillard actually builds his work on a foundation again that comes out of the Marxist tradition Gaeta Board wrote a book in the 60s called the Society of the spectacle and what it was about was about how when capitalism reached a certain level of accumulation commodities began to detach themselves and become images and citizens who formerly had played roles as political actors began to detach themselves from their own lives and become spectators so for example you could you could say well instead of like going to a family reunion now we'll just rent you know a Steve Martin father of the bride movie it's just as good and so on and and you meet the same kooky characters that you actually know their behavior is all simulated bull another another similar and this is going to sound cynical but I don't want it to I mean a baudrillard has visited our country and we went to a Disneyland and Epcot Center in these various parks he said well this is much better than Europe the food's better than Europe it's a short walk between France and Germany land you know you don't have to go through all those deal with all those nasty waiters everyone's so polite the simulation has outrun the so-called reality that concept in Baudrillard he calls the hyper real hyper reality is more real than real this is actually sense if some of this sounds like advertising slogans good because in baudrillard that the heritage of philosophy and social theory has passed over into advertising and television so if it sounds super fine good because the theory the world that he looks at has become superficial and banal if it sounds hokey like a salesman's pitch good the world he describes is the world of Jurassic Park not of Dante so that is all evidence on the side of Baudrillard if you follow the argument deep enough and with enough clarity okay let me explain the hyper reality this is an important concept in Baudrillard in Baudrillard we've already said reality is simply that which can be simulated can't be simulated not real but more real than real is a reality and I guess I could I could give you again I hate to use these movie examples if you haven't seen the movies but in a Clockwork Orange there's a great line that anticipates the postmodern when up when the eat the character played by Malcolm McDowell says it's funny how blood isn't really blood until you've idiot on the screen until you see it on a movie screen in real life it looks kind of brown and mucky on the screen it looks more real than real blood and this sense of the sort of hyper reality we get with cinema we get with television and so on is another phenomenon baudrillard wants to examine and i think that here we get and I mean I guess my politics are showing again but here we get the phenomenon of Reagan the hyper real president more real and real I mean he's better at being Harry Truman than Harry Truman I mean the distinction about what he is is lost in the hyper reality of his smile which like the Cheshire cats just gleams across his face and we get for the first time a phenomenon ever known in polling which is the phenomenon of not liking a person but of liking liking a person this is a sign you're dealing with the hyper real let me make let me go over that again Reagan's popularity was popular when when you went through the various traits of Reagan and what Reagan stood for in his policies and so on vast numbers of people disliked apparently all of them what was popular was his popularity and I don't think that Reagan's alone in this show business figures have the same thing go on for years I can't remember the last Michael Jackson song that I even listened to and are my kids who also don't like Michael Jackson but he's popular but not not in the old sense it is a hyper popularity if you follow me his it is popular that he's popular Madonna has learned to live and create herself on the curve of the postmodern by making it her goal to be more popular than popular by having her popularity the topic of popularity I mean we found out that she can't particularly act or sing she is not built well enough to be a true cybernetic sex symbol for this period and yet she manages because of her understanding of this situation that I that baudrillard calls the hyperreal to stay on this curve of popularity hyper reality of course affects us across many different spectrums and it's built on the real it is not as though the hyper-real could get by without injections of reality in it it requires and this is not a principle for Baudrillard but one that I have realized from watching a lot of television you have to have injections of reality in order to keep the images afloat occasionally in fact one of the new strategies adopted by television and it serves two functions one is a cost function are these reality shows they've realized that we've become as it were to intoxicated with hyper reality with you know Kojak and and you know super cops and so on so now we just have shows like cops we just go to Fort Worth and film a bunch of cops being cops that serves the good intelligent economic interest because you don't pay cops much just for being cops it's not that lucrative and it injects well is it reality well it is compared only to this scale of hyper reality and only under the sign of being whatever can be simulated we have just had our first simulated trial not our first but the first televised one that caused a riot Rodney King where the events are videotaped the the trial is shown on television the effects are all televised and how anyone can find themselves around in these new phenomenon and pretend that nothing new has happened that frustrates both Baudrillard and myself I mean he's not right about everything but clearly something's different when we're in a world like that one like this one clearly something significant has changed and it has affected the very nature of what cells are what humans are what subjects are when I talked about how my students had no dreams I mean what is there left to dream when I was a kid I dreamed about dinosaurs I had a little Walt Disney dinosaur book why would I need to dream about dinosaurs now Steven Spielberg has made them he's filmed them they're more real than real dinosaurs they're hyper real you would be disappointed if you saw real Tyrannosaurus Rex after the movie you would be disappointed it wouldn't be as noisy as scarier as frightening same is true of Jaws yeah I've actually caught some rather large sharks I mean I like to I like to fish you know pier fish so I've caught a few sharks I'm fair fairly good size but those real experiences are so boring compared to Jaws I mean jaws is a hyper real experience now the only way I mean there's no systematic way to discuss baudrillard because these things are not systematic these are the shifting contingent ways in which cultures change and the people who draw their meaning from them change as the cultures change so all we can do here is point to certain exemplary phenomena so let me pick out some more we've discussed hyper-reality and simulations let me move on our Baudrillard what wrote a wonderful piece about the Gulf War the name of the piece was the enemy has disappeared and now I don't want you to think that I believe what I'm about to say is my own position I'm just giving you Baudrillard because I don't think the Gulf War was planned as deeply as he does in the regards that he thought it was I baudrillard I was offered a job by French newspaper to cover the war so of course he agreed on condition he not go to the Gulf because he wanted to cover it on CNN where it would really happen follow me mean the war would really who won or lost would be told to us on CNN we won't know who won or lost anywhere else so he to cover the war in the sense of hyper reality the way to cover it is seeing in one's flat in Paris on CNN that's how he covered the war his thesis runs as such he took the girl go for very seriously buggery art states that war is real if anything is I think that's a powerful quote if anything is real warriors you know I mean if if if we it sounds pessimistic but if there's something we can still attach reality and meaning to it if it's not war one would wonder what it was because it is a jejak just an incredible human event filled with passion pain suffering madness and all and all that if if it's not real what is if anything at all would be it would be war according to Baudrillard reading of the war America as for Baudrillard the leading society culturally in the world the one that leads the cultural trajectory of the world through television movies and so on the war that we fought in the Gulf was not directed against the enemy I mean as it turned out the enemy was left not much different than we found them it was not directed against any enemy at all the enemy disappeared in the show business the war was directed against reality the war was to show us that even war isn't real the war was to kill the Vietnam syndrome a war that we remember as real as a real war so what so the way to kill that memory according to Baudrillard is to fight a hyper real war complete with evening shots of shrapnel falling into Israel which it turned out a lot of the shrapnel was from the Patriots that were fired up into the sky the scuds were after all bad Russian technology isn't good technology and the technology that we had sold them wasn't our best it's sort of AI I mean to the extent that there was some reality the war it was no more complex then the reason I that the British want a battle in the 12th century because there their bow and arrows would shoot further than the other guys so they could stand for their back sort of the real part of the war may have been along those dimensions but the hyper real part was to watch the nightly Scud watch the Scud explosions on TV and it's hard to even evoke that the feeling of togetherness the American people had in the glow of the television set watching and I mean even the names are straight out of Steven Spielberg Patriot missiles blowing up scuds I mean the poetry of the hyper-real is something I mean Walt Disney wouldn't do something like that hokey Patriots versus scuds I mean that's worse than Darth Vader or something I mean so the Patriots would blow up the scuds of course later we found out according to the Israeli military that they're only what one or two confirmed hits CNN of course showed those over and over and over again to us so that as we watch the war since those hits could be simulated the hyper real feeling of continuing victory and success of our technology was conforth daily capped off by the moral equivalent of a sports casters coming at the end of a game every night when the military people would get out and roll out the scorecard for the day very much like we do after the Bulls and Phoenix play and we come out and and sort of like the u.s. is Michael Jordan you know and the other side is Berkeley and Michael Michael scored 55 Patriot missile shots the other side 28 and we won you know against the third best team and in the world the third largest army well by the end of the article I had I was wondering I was going you know that's just way too cynical even for me I can't buy that argument and then I began to think about what the war look like on TV and I comment then I then I just had to start trying to find people who had been in the war and sure enough I found someone in Durham who had been I put you know a lot of North Carolina people go to I found a young pilot and he said oh that no it was it was very exciting and then he went on to explain to me how the sites that they used in order to you know father's smart bombs were just like the games and the arcade that he grew up with said you know no way in the world could Evi had better practice than he got within those arcades to fire smart bombs I mean it had passed him by that the real had happened even though he was really there I talked to a woman who had been on the ground in a jeep for most of it and she went oh the deserts so big and the sand she said but I really didn't get a feel for it till I got home and saw what my husband had typed why because the little individual actors sink into insignificance compared to the damn spectacle of the thing the spectacle of it I mean when humans were less important than God we could understand because he built everything when we're less important than a Nintendo we get confused that's when we start thinking we're under siege it's when Billy says oh yes you can tell mom and dad but leave the Nintendo then we're up then we're rightfully upset the postmodern trajectory leaves us in a situation where drawing the line between the real and the unreal is no longer merely philosophical but a practical day-to-day issue see this is what I want to drive home we're not off in some fairyland this is a practical day-to-day issue of figuring out what's the simulation and what's not is this guy really an insurance salesman or is he here to rob me you know I mean these are this is this is no longer cartesian doubt that one has to conjure up in a meditation this is a wide radical doubt about the very ground beneath our feet whether and it's the nature of whether it's real or not baudrillard says its best at this point to simply face it that what we're witnessing is the end of the world the end of human beings and he thinks that there's no reason to be sad or upset or cynical about it in fact Baudrillard calls it the ecstasy of communication I mean I tried to do this in a kind of ironic way I don't know how one presents this kind of material I suggest you read books by this person I brought one called fatal strategies about things one might do under such conditions but anyway now he thinks that just rather than just being occasion for some deep gloom the ecstasy of communication means that we should go ahead and realize that America has won the Cold War America is utopia realized this is the country everyone dreamed of it is of course with all that we know that goes along with it now it turns out to be like all utopias sadly disappointing but weren't they always weren't they always every utopia in some sense boring and sadly disappointing well Baudrillard says says now we have to in spite of this we have to look upon the end of man the world and so on as an opportunity because what were these concepts anyway like the man like man and world except concepts by which the world was regulated policed mapped and controlled all four of which are becoming more and more difficult to do under this situation of rapidly increasing complexity which I've mentioned many times and I mean system complexity at every level rapid increase in information technologies and invasions directly into the human body that interface it with machines that goes all the way from plastic surgery to artificial hearts and implants to virtual reality where we'll be able to make a person who can't walk feel as though he can walk or she can walk I mean this is not a technology I dreamed up they're trying now to develop cheap marketable versions of this right as I speak here right now so but so Baudrillard doesn't want us to go oh it's the end of the world's apocalypse now it's too late for that it's already happened if you want to Des Moines it was sort of like the moaning curve is past now and it's time to try to just sort of readjust to the flows in some way and Baudrillard suggests a whole series of what he calls fatal strategies by which we might be able to protect what he calls our fractal selves if you know what fractals look like in geometry little reproduced pictures out like this is one way to think of it our fractal fractal selves split reproducible we have life changes now uh and they've become not changes in our life for example to give you to show you the distance that we've traveled not like Augustine's conversion to Christianity when he hears he R thinks he hears the voice of God saying tolay like a tyke read and he reads the scripture and becomes a Christian and then he he's a new man he's born again no no no that's that's over now now we change alright we change rapidly we change as I said professions six or seven or eight times and we change who and what we are the way we used to change our clothes in our fashion I mean that there are kids now who get through college and there are six different people before their junior year two months as a bohemian two months as a pre-med student two months as a preppy two months as a poet a month and a half as a journalist a month in as a - psychologist a month and all the rest and all the requisite uniforms for it none of it felt none of it part of effect a fad a personality formed as a fad as a fashion as an ornament I mean this this really doesn't overstate the case for me well one of the sensations this produces is not the sensations of existentialism like dread despair and those but it produces new sensations ecstasy is one of them I mean you go to see Jurassic Park are an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie for the ecstasy of communication by that I mean for the pure neural thrill Wow a t-rex Oh a raptor and it just runs through Raptors t-rexes or Arnold just beats up people that you know you view as bad or coded as bad by the society and there's this visceral ecstatic feel like when you get your first facts I mean this is in the old days your first facts if you will permit me a slot vulgarity was when you lost your virginity now it still is except now we mean faxing you know coming out like the estimates people tell little secret stories about it when did you first facts that's a different world you know if you're a facts virgin you won't be you won't understand it you haven't lived yeah that's the common story faxing has replaced a lot of things just fax it to me no anyway I so so ecstasy is one emotion that's produced by it but don't think that it's the ecstasy of the sublime that what that Schiller talked about when one sees either a beautiful landscape or of this the other feeling of the sublime that one might associate with with standing before the Pieta or the daveed or something like that it's not that kind of ecstasy it's more visceral it's more direct it's more like the ecstasy that your children feel when they beat you know the worst monster at the highest level of the link to you know one of those new video games they beat the big monster and there's just a visceral neural thrill of ecstasy what this may cause in some of the older generation like myself I'm admit I've already admitted that I'm a still modern I'm just trying to trace out the postmodern trajectory and look at it I mean my kids will have to live in more of it than I will ever see so I'm trying to understand it and think about it as much as I can in a sense you get is one that resembles vertigo how many of you have seen vertigo the great Alfred Hitchcock movie you know that's sort of sickly sense that you're twisting above I sort of are busily too much of something this seems to me a fine sort of lewd characterization for the postmodern projectory a sense of vertigo before all this information well if DC's like the ones that I have just scribe that baudrillard holes are true but of course the word true will no longer apply because we'll be in a setting in which you won't want the true you'll want the truer than true you you won't even the false won't even be a good enough life for you you'll want to lie better than a lie I mean the truer than true explanation you won't just want Oliver Stone's film about JFK you'll want the film about how Oliver Stone himself participated in the plot to cover up the real assassins by making the film JFK do you want the truth about the truth about the truth and all the way down interminably vertigo that's the sense you get looking down that chain of bizarre stories and I think that that they're certain the way people deal with this is interesting they deal with it as a form of complexity a word I've used probably too many times it makes them people caught in this cusp between an old world and an old paradigm that is dying and a new one that it cannot really yet be born and we find ourselves in that space and it draws us to people like Ross Perot who say it's just that simple it's just that simple he's that simple that's the most powerful political rhetoric in a world with a postmodern trajectory God how we would love it if someone could tell us anything was just that simple and then of course when you see a pie chart you know Oh a pie chart I mean it has more religious meaning now than a crucifix to see a pie chart then because why is that so popular because it reduces complexity the complexity is very real but his little sound bites his little conversations with Larry King helped to reduce that complexity and they put another message in there now I know it's real complicated but we can fix it Americans have always fixed it we mixed it well if Baudrillard right we fixed it all right we fixed it all the way up and down Anna and Ivy you know we see other people engaging in this same sort of try attempting to reduce complexity I mean the political parties to the extent that they exist at all anymore is anything other than fundraising devices which I don't know I don't think they have any ideology because in a postmodern situation who would have an ideology except just as a momentary thing like your week is a communist by Susie st. Pierre at Duke my week is a Trotskyist my week is a Buddhist my two weeks is a follower of the cult of Elvis I mean these are papers that you could legitimately expect people to write if they still read or wrote not many people still do either read or write much but in any case reduction of complexity look at the political parties for a moment the Republicans with their great traditions have come up with the slogan of incredible sophistication no more taxes spent now any of you can quack that one out could be a Republican and I'm using that in the Orwellian sense of quack you don't need to engage higher brain functions all you have to do is say don't take my money and don't spend it well except on me and my friends but don't taxes man now it's not the Democrats doing any better I don't guess that's news I mean Clinton is now less popular than Castro if Castro ran against Clinton Clinton would lose by a few points I mean he wouldn't lose big but he'd lose you know by a few points I mean especially in a three-person race with Clinton Castro Perot and Qaddafi I mean I don't know who would win in fact in a part given this postmodern world any one of the four could emerge with the biggest one-fourth depending on how they ran the campaign probably it would depend on who could hire David Gerken you know I mean if Fidel got to gergan first he might win the damn thing we don't know but the Democrats response to this tax-and-spend this no we don't nananananana invest this is political debate in a democracy no it's not it's the simulation of politics Ross Perot is not leading a movement it is a simulation of a movement follow me this is not a populist revolt Ross Perot's not Teddy Roosevelt this is a simulation now am i putting it down no in some ways Ross Perot is a paradigmatically more real than real he is hyper real mean as opposed to Regan he really was a businessman that made millions you know Clinton there's a whole bunch of billions I think's a fair in Ross's case and so on I mean it's so in a way there is more reality to it in any case the the current political structures are way behind this curve they don't understand it well at all in spite of all the talk about the selling of the President that's very old-fashioned yeah we all have lived with advertising for years what we haven't lived with are ads that have more narrative structure and meaning than the programs I'll mention a few of those because I think they're interesting the current McDonald's I ads that kind of tell a part of your life story in like a two and a half minute I I just like from when you get married do you have your grandkids till you died you get that two and a half minutes and then there's a McDonald's thing like good I was born I had kids I died in the meantime I got a Big Mac I mean this it's sort of Gone with the Wind convinced into a short version it's it's fast its hyper real and in the meantime you at least got a Big Mac and you know you never will have to be hungry again you know reproduced to infinity over and over on video type change to laserdisc you can watch Scarlett O'Hara say that million times like if we had the technology right now to do it we could just have scarlet back there screaming about terror while I'm doing this in any case if baudrillard is even onto something what the postmodern trajectory means is that the self is not under siege it's lost it's just lost and if that's true then all of the strategies by which ordinary people tried to live decent good lives are lost along with it I'm not necessarily going to buy that right away I'm really not I do think that that the the new the new technologies are going to call forth I mean this is why the title of this course has been the self under siege if I didn't think it was a real virulent technological siege and just some thought up philosophers dream this would not have interested me I mean I have no interest in that I mean what I am interested in is what it's changing the lives of my children and your children and so on what will shape culture society what we used to call society culture and history that's what I am interested in if it is the end of the world I want to know so my kids and I can enjoy the apocalypse together if America is utopia realized and I maybe I'll just settle back and go to Epcot Center and forget Switzerland just go on the Swiss ride this may be what I'll do I doubt it I don't like in the war zone in other words may not be in defending the self may not be any one of the classical ones like the working class versus the ruling class the slaves against the Masters oppressed women against a patriarchal society blacks against whites know the struggle in the future maybe to maintain the real against the unreal or the hyper-real or the aerial the desire for experience and this is I'm trying to kind of be upbeat about the situation agreeing the desire for experience is also the experience for it's also a desire for kind of experience what I mean by that is this that even in these rather you know the rather hopeless picture I painted of the young there remains something like a curiosity about what experience would be like if I could have one and there is an absolute extremism everywhere about how far people will go to try to have a genuine experience if I can still use the word genuine you see because again the language has been polluted by this very movement that I've been describing say genuine you'll think about a genuine beer of genuine boots or a genuine you know cowboy hat or whatever no a genuine experience an authentic experience a real experience the battle lines may be between anonymous forces that have been unleashed by a technology that grew out of capital that will be controlled in the hands of not many people perhaps perhaps not I mean we don't know and people who still would like to have some experience this wouldn't make them archaic old fuddy-duddies if they said hey look honey why not tonight why don't we really make love the two of us instead of getting in our virtual reality sex machines that may become a revolutionary move in the near future it may be it may become interesting if a candidate runs for an office and actually believes one thing well I'd be that'd be an incredible new politics yeah everybody in America wants a new politics we'll go out and find somebody that believes one damn thing and running for something you'll have a new politics I mean that's the the deficit of experience that hasn't been sucked into this system of images and so on now this sounds extreme but think of how we're socialized all of us continually bombarded with images from magazines TVs newspapers videotapes I'm not unaware of where I am I'm in the circuit - now if you want to stay by the way for a moment follow Baudrillard advice he wrote a very cute book called forget Baudrillard which meant yeah this stuff is not theoretical it's happening all around you so forget Baudrillard he also wrote a book called forget Foucault where he talks about how it's the spectacle of the prison more than the prison that frightens us now in other words it's rap music with it I'm gonna kill you stuff that's really scares you you very seldom ever see a black person we mostly stay away from them so don't see many of them so it's sort of like their music that scares us by you know giving us a projection of street life itself that that parades is real but actually it's more real than real you know I've been in Compton they don't have a drive every two minutes it's just that's not true I mean not that I could prove it because we have these images of hyper-reality well this calls for fatal strategies according to Baudrillard we have to adopt fatal strategies here fatal strategies extremes we have to learn to live with complexity uncertainty and a certain amount of vertigo we just have to do that we don't have any choice I mean we only have the dinosaur choice that's what you kind of wander off into the ice caps and sort of fall away we and I also think that we have to be wary of the over over quick reduction of complexity if some of this lecturers seemed a little weird or to go a little too far it's because I don't want to reduce quite all of this to slogans on the other hand I don't want it to not be funny because part of the postmodern trajectory itself is a rather humorous joke on the human race which labored for millennia to reduce working hours in our to produce leisure so we could enjoy this very leisure that then turns in a kind of vengeful act against us absorbing our leisure time which was to be our living time into time now spent in the service of what can only be called this inhuman spectacle I mean it's a very bizarre and twisted fight it went to which post modernity has led us so I would be wary of simple answers to this one way to follow it without to follow some of these developments without reading Baudrillard is to follow our cyberpunk artifacts movie is like Blade Runner and also places which you're likely to show up in anyway look at the latest malls and how the tracks are designed in them you know the little paths I mean you can't walk just anywhere in the mall now Kenya now I mean they're little pathways tracks look at that go to Atlanta and see a hotel it gleams like a glistening Palace and all this well before I get too carried away with all these phenomena which you can see around you every day you've got to remember that even in that hotel in Atlanta in the winter the poor still crawl in the post-modern cracks and sleep at night so I mean it is not as though that turning the world as it were hyper real has somehow done anything other than make our situation more extreme visa vie those people who have fallen as it were out of the loop altogether there is in this country now the most alarming lack of sympathy for those people who've fallen off the boat if you know what I mean people who somehow slipped off the track I mean I'm not sure they want a lot of sympathy but if they did there'd be an alarming short supply of it and I think part of that is because they add still further to the complexity when I've talked about the postmodern in the way baudrillard does is a trajectory I see it as an emergent aspect of our culture our culture is still dominantly modernist rationalized capitalist and so on and even make things more complex thirdly there are residual elements in our culture left over from earlier periods for example patriarchy left over from a past as ancient perhaps as the species well I don't know how much further we can go down this road but in any case the road according to Baudrillard is an endless set of what will it be fatal strategies to use his new title and all we can do is wait and see what will happen if nothing does in the sense of the real Baudrillard will have a kind of confirmation it's my hope that he will be disconfirmed on the simple grounds that wherever we find power even the power of the hyper-real we found we find counter power and where we see an image that reproduces us is inhuman occasionally we see an image that somehow has the bizarre transcendent power to make us slightly more human again but it's along that terrain I think that the battles and the struggles the self will fight with itself will be fought in the future

Channel: The Partially Examined Life

Views: 205,986

Rating: 4.9187713 out of 5

Keywords: baudrillard, Jean Baudrillard, rick, roderick, Full, hyperreality, war, philosophy, philosopher

Id: 2U9WMftV40c

Length: 48min 2sec (2882 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 25 2012

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just last night in the car, as i was trying to convince my ten-year-old to put down her ubiquitous iPod and talk to me, she complained that her life was just so stupid and boring without it -- she could put it down and talk to me, but it would bore her to tears. this shabby handheld simulator was superior to the world entire. talk about being faced with the seduction of the hyperreal.

once she did put it down, we started to talk -- and it wasn't ten minutes before she and i were discussion the nature of our relationship, her deep fears about growing up, her need to be loved not just as a person in the process of achieving adulthood but as a child... the real is still there as substrate, and it can be accessed. but tolerating the possibility of boredom is something like the price of that access.

[u/Valvt]

Thanks! Do you have any other videos on Baudrillard?

[u/dczx]

Thank you for sharing this ever relevant topic.

RIP Rick Roderick

[u/_sic]

I would like to read or see an interpretation using more current examples of social media and the internet, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, the war on terror, etc.

[u/sk3pt1c]

Thank you for this, it was very good! I like Baudrillard and this dude helped explain/flesh out some stuff for me, I'll watch more of his talks trying to focus on the content and not the talk itself :D