Baudrillard Joe Krakoff

Most critiques are those of substances, like the capitalism critique which can speak
to the consumerist policies of the affirmative. The form is how and the content is
what in a given debate. The Baudrillard critique speaks about how our society has
been concentrated with the profusion of information, and information is as simple as
a claim to a capital T truth about the world. We dont just receive information; we
consume it like anything else. The presentation of an argument within a debate is in
fact contrary to its own intent, our evidence that the usage of facts and evidence is
uniquely dissuasive. For example, warming scientists come out with long papers to
prove warming, and then to disprove the theism argument and it just goes on and
on again. Theres also psychological evidence of how information technology
creates a kind of overload of the individual psyche that we are unable to make
sense of the world. He situates this not as the collapse of truth, but of meaning, and
he ties Nietzsche meaning of nihilism to the advent of media-technology and factory
reproduction and standardization. The Work of Art in the Age of Technological
Reproduction, but the entire introduction is about when he was a kind there was a
lions head door knocker, and he thought it was beautiful, and then he was thirty he
saw the exact same door knocker reproduced in the same city and he engaged in a
fit of melancholia and didnt leave his room. When you can reproduce anything on
command that is the true crisis of nihilism. Walter Benjamin took his life in 1940, but
one the last thing he did was wrote the Work of Art in the age of mechanical
reproduction. This is an era in which sign value has been attached to the microfabric of all life, how something signifies, how something conveys meaning is the
most important thing. Rather than the collapse of something like religion, its about
the infinite reproduction of everything. It is impossible to form meaningful
relationships about anything because they are all mired in a technological super
structure that destroys the possibility for uniqueness. Baudrillard insists nihilism is
worse because of technological reproduction because there is no aesthetics, the
singularity of any aesthetic experience is impossible. We have rendered the world
meaningless through our attempt to impose meaning onto it. Signs can be words,
images, representations, videos, advertisements. Referents are the real thing the
sign refers to, but this pact has been broken, we are now overloaded with signs that
no longer refer to any real object. Language and signification has become orbital
but it is achieving escape velocity, we long for a world that is grounded and we
could believe in, but now we are in the hyperreal. Baudrillard says reality was born
when Galileo looked through a telescope and assumed we could have a transparent
relationship with the world around him. Baudrillard picks an opaque and transparent
metaphor, Galileo trying to create a one to one relationship between sign and
referent this is called the will to transparency, to make the world understandable.
This has been the driving force of western violence, and colonization a project of
knowledge accumulation. We discussed the all-seeing eye of metaphysics, this is
similar, it is the presupposition the human can have a transparent surrounding of
the world around them. A simulacrum is a copy without an original. A couple
examples of this a prototype, a model of a building is used to sell the idea of the
building and then the building is built. The original is unfaithful to the translation
rather than the other way. In the movie blade runner, ford has to find replicants but
doesnt know if hes a replicant and that makes him question his own very
existence. We want language to be a copy of reality, but its a linguistic concept we
created, every word we have is a simulacrum. It is the truth that we hide none.

There is nothing that we have not already encountered that has not already been
encountered by a hulking source of media which has processed it. When you look at
your facebook, it that you, or you playing a role. Is that youre body, is it attached to
your body, or is it a copy of you. Even in their real life, everything is already
signifying, your day to day life is not your real life. What is an affirmative but a
simulated object, youre giving speeches to reproduce information, but then you go
through debates with things that you have. The idea that there is an affirmative or a
negative, these are simulacra. Language is phenomenal, the real is the nominal.
Reality is when we begin to assume some scientific relationship between language
and the world that we use. We think the world is equal to language, and if we were
to take all of language and all of material existence those things would be the same.
The problem for Baudrillard is the combination of the two, when we believe the
simulacrum is real, rather than delight in the fictional nature of everything.
Hyperreality is a world more real than real, a world in which the real has
fundamentally collapsed but the primary motor of society is to simulate the real.
The project of hyperreality is a self-defeating one.
Trumps off the cuff, hes not scripted like other politicians, he is performing a
simulacrum of authenticity. He is a result of the profusion of information, and lots of
news articles were shocked how this buffoon could be winning so they covered him
on television. They thought they could prove that hes a moron who is unfit to lead
the country, but the exact opposite happened. Politics is now a parody of itself, all
politicians are playing roles like actors in a film, and its not a question of being
intelligent, but rather playing a role, simulating him. Even Obama and Clinton are
actors playing roles themselves. Debate is both a result of as well a machine for the
indoctrinate into hyperreal society. Debate assumes to be transparent and as a
means of representing the objective world outside of the activity. Baudrillard says
that is bad and that maintain the will to truth which maintains the will to mastery,
its self-defeating. Theres the commodification for a ballot, and the reduction of
things like suffering into information blips through the ballot, thats a critique of
informatics, depoliticizing and robbing these people of any agency and in the act
the western spectator is able to delight in the suffering others. Speed are
emblematic of the will to transparency, and crucially for him, radical moves which
are different on the level of content but maintain the form of debate as it is
currently constituted are in fact worse. Theyre worse because this is what sustains
the system, the ability for everything to be reduced to information, to signs, to
language, he wrote this book called Forget Foucault, it is too objective and it is too
true. Foucaults attempt to analyze power relations from a leftist perspective is one
that seems to be insurgent but colludes with the will to transparency in the way in
which it is written. Baudrillard is frustrated by what he calls the hegemony of the
message in communication studies, or it is already concerned with the message,
but the idea that there is a message that is conveyed is ideological. It presumes
that there is a discrete subject sender and an object receiver and in so doing reify
the subject-object divide. Its an assumption we rarely question but is in fact a
validly political act, it naturalizes the subject-object divide that is necessary for a
host of other terrible things. Without a notion of subject or object, no slavery, no
patriarchy, no oppression anything. When I say I love, I have already cheated on you
because I have fallen in love with language. Just because we in our own lives have
moments of intersubjective meaning does not justify the enormous and hulking
infrastructure of technological reproduction. How do you describe violence? We had

to debate idiots from MSU several times over, and if youre saying everything is not
real, you are complicit with rape culture. Dont shoot the messenger, were not
saying it is not good that the impossibility of metaphysical claims. In the 13 th
century, these monks got together and came up with the doctrine of the idea of
presumption. We need to make people believe in God, then you have no ethical way
to say that murder is bad. You should presume towards the existence of God
because you might go to hell if you dont. Draw an analogy between that and
people saying oppression didnt matter, you need God in order to say that murder is
bad. We are actively creating our own values that decry the murder you are
indicting. Baudrillard makes the role of the western intellectual versus catastrophe.
You only need facebook because youre not alive, and reality because youre
estranged. The need for western intellectuals to refer to the plight of other people is
evidence of the fact how unreal our lives are, the western academic takes up the
cross of people who face plight. The people who actually experience those forms of
trauma dont need reminders about how its real, they try to forget, people who
duck into an alley through a shooting and then continue on their way. They go on
about how real the war is, to convince themselves, the Western intellectuals are
parasitic and use such trauma as intellectual capital on this weird market. Cards of
suffering are traded, the UN going into Sudan and then crushed that their aff was no
longer relevant. Peoples that are victims of trauma dont experience it, it is so
overwhelming that you dont feel like its happening. Things are put into ballots but
theres lot of dangers to that.