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person on earth
1. Fiat abuse
Interpretation if the negative reads an alternative framing
mechanism, they must clarify a standard or roll of the ballot
text in the nc which contextualizes how to weigh offense and
cannot just claim that the cards provide a framing
mechanism.
1. Strat
a. Dk
b. shift
1ar baudrillard
Baudrillard is wrong---debate SOLVES collapse and
oversaturation of meaning
Turner 4 Bryan S. Turner, Dean of Social Sciences at Deakin University,
Australia, Baudrillard for Sociologists, in Forget Baudrillard?, 2004 edition,
p. 80-83
While, as far as one can tell, Baudrillard was not influenced by Bells vision of the role of technology and the media in shaping
postindustrialism, he was influenced by Marshall McLuhans analysis (Gane 1991b:48) of the impact of new media on the transformation
of modern culture, especially in The Gutenberg Galaxy (McLuhan 1967). McLuhan was particularly sensitive to the idea that we live in a
processed social world where human beings live in a complete technostructure. This technological environment is carried with us as
extensions of our own bodies, but McLuhan did not adopt a pessimistic view of the age of anxiety, because his technological humanism
(Kroker et al. 1984) and Catholic values committed him to the idea of the immanence of reason and the hope of an escape from the
labyrinth. Indeed, a global technological system could become the basis of a universalistic culture. Although he was fully aware of the
sensory deprivation which he associated with the impact of the mass media, he none the less remained committed to the hope that these
Instead of
external critique of capitalism, was merely a reflection or mirror of the principal economistic values of capitalism.
mass
mass audience. However, the trend of sociological analysis in the last two decades has been to assert that
However, sociological
(bourgeois) individual has been sucked into the negative electrical mass of the media age.
and according to various practices (de Certeau 1984). In fact, sociologists, largely
inspired by the Situationists, have argued that everyday life is resistant to
massification and that the concrete reality of everyday life-situations is the principal arena within which opposition to
massification can be expected. Everyday life was regarded by both Guy Debord and Henri Lefebvre (1991) as the foundation of
Baudrillard , by arguing that criticism belongs to the period of modernism and not to the age of hyperreality,
authenticity.
has ruled out opposition to the system , at least at the level of public
debate and formal politics.
Its not all simulacra --- reality still exists outside the text
--- should take into account the people whose lives are
actually affected by these images
Simon Blackburn 7, professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, 4-
29-07, Au revoir Baudrillard, Prospect ,
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2007/04/aurevoirbaudrillard/---- {hors
texte = outside the text}
Baudrillard was not concerned with the artists touch but with what happens when television and other media purport to
take us to the field of action. The 1990 Gulf war was modelled by planners using simulations; it was won, if we call a
massacre a victory, largely by pilots looking at computer screens; and it was relayed to the public by television. Most
consumers of these images get no reality check; the image is all we have to go on. And the image does not come to us
innocently. What happened in 1990 may, indeed, have been something more than a war: an episode in Americas cultural
narcissism, a hallucinatory projection of its fears and fantasies, a Faustian pact between developed capitalism and virtual
Baudrillards
reality, a promotional video, or a simulacrum indistinguishable from Disneyland. So
hyperbole had a serious point. He often provoked outrage by it, but
when, for instance, he tactlessly suggested that the iconic place of Nazi atrocities as a symbol of evil makes it logical to
ask whether they even existed, his point was not to ally himself with the David Irvings of this world, but to suggest that for
many political and cultural purposes, the answer is irrelevant. As with God, it is our investment that matters, not whether
Baudrillards ideas about simulated reality seem to
it is invested in a fiction.
have touched on an old philosophical panic. Perhaps our senses are no better than our
televisions. Perhaps nature has varnished and spun the pictures we
receive. They too are commodities, bought in to provide sustenance. Perhaps, at the limit, we live in a
virtual reality, unable to comprehend our real position, sentenced to
a woeful life of dreams, myth, fiction and illusion. Baudrillard, the inspiration for the Matrix films, tried to distance
himself from the trite opposition of one moment seeing through the glass darkly and then coming face to face with reality,
generalised scepticism
yet he enjoyed playing with its ingredients. I do not think this was wise, since
implies that there is nothing especially wrong about America or late
capitalism or consumer societyand would any self-respecting
culture critic want to draw that conclusion? In any event, it is not all
simulacra . We are participants in a public world, not hermits
trapped in our own private cinemas. The cure for the sceptical nightmare
is action. Nobody stays sceptical while crossing the street, or
choosing dinner. Nor while dodging bombs and shells, even if they
are sent by people watching computer screens. In the hurly-burly of
survival, there is a lot that is hors textealthough this is more true for
the artisan driving nails or baking bread than for the politician (or academic)
whose work is confined to the production of signs and messages.
it doesnt mean they shouldnt resist either. That means they not
but
Its a model
second level is what Rudi Dutschke called what I referred to earlier as the long march through the institutions.
that makes a tactical claim to having one foot in and one foot out.
You cant turn these established institutions over to the Right . You cant
simply dismiss them by saying theyre nothing more than hegemonic institutions that oppress people. Thats a retreat
from politics. You have to fight within these institutions. Not only that, you
have to create new public spheres. SK: Henry, weve covered a lot of territory. Is there anything we
havent addressed that you would like to bring up before closing? HG: We need both a language of
were fighting for the future . And so critique is not enough; we need a
language of critique and we need a language of possibility to be
able to go forward with this.
Dissociate yourself from conventional life, capitalism, and the vulgar bourgeoisiepreferably by discovering in the
unlikeliest places half-hidden machinations of repressive control. Eager to be ever more maudit than thou,
Baudrillard manages to surpass the imaginative fecundity of even the
magisterial Foucault. First he weighs in with the now familiar claim that the definition of madness is but a ploy,
that every psychological dysfunction vis--vis normality (which is only the law of the capitalist milieu) is open to a
He then proceeds, via a social interpretation of physical disease,
political reading.
to caution us against the pathological dangers of bourgeois hygiene.
Conveniently, no mention is made of what science and attendant public
health measures have accomplished against cholera, typhoid, smallpox,
diphtheria, yellow fever, malaria, influenza, polio, leprosy, syphilis, etc.
Instead, Baudrillards argument, such as it is, resembles a bizarre
crossbreeding of Christian Science with those lunatic Communist-conspiracy
tirades launched in the 1950s against the fluoridation of city water supplies:
The artificial purification of all milieus, atmospheres, and environments will supplant the failing internal immune systems.
If these systems are breaking down it is because an irreversible tendency called progress pushes the human body and
spirit into relinquishing its systems of defense and self-determination, only to replace them with technical artifacts.
Divested of his defenses, man becomes eminently vulnerable to science. Divested of his phantasies, he becomes
eminently vulnerable to psychology. Freed of his germs, he becomes eminently vulnerable to medicine. It would
not be too far-fetched to say that the extermination of mankind begins with
the extermination of germs. In short, medical progress is a plotlike other
bourgeois inventions, its just another way of stifling naturalism and exerting
control. [3] Purport to extend and correct the prevailing vanguard position. (Add ten points if you can do so through a
reflexive argument that turns key doctrinal precepts back upon themselves.) A major preoccupation of radical thinkers,
from the founding of the Frankfurt School onward, has been the search for an alchemic formula that would somehow rid
critical theory of such real-life Marxist impurities as chronic low productivity, avant-garde condescension toward the
masses, brute censorship, and, most embarrassing of all, the nettlesome Gulag. Baudrillards solution is the magic of
transparency, which renders all such difficulties instantly unreal. Had Marx only had the benefit of modern semiotics, he
would have realized that commodification explains not simply one element of the capitalist system but the system in toto,
There is no biological essence of man, according to
along with its very presuppositions.
Baudrillard, hence no constant and irreducible requirement for food, shelter,
and safety: the vital anthropological minimum doesnt exist. It is an illusion conjured up after the fact to justify
and perpetuate the productivist enterprise: there are only needs because the system needs them. Everything
essential to humankind transpires symbolically, as is evident when Baudrillard asks,
rhetorically, is loss of statusor social non-existenceless upsetting than hunger? The monstrosity of
such a conception in light of, say, the recent famine in Ethiopia is best
contemplated in purely humorous terms. Imagine, then, Monsieur
Baudrillard in a restaurant. He peruses the menu fastidiously, selecting at
last, with the waiters recommendation, medallions of veal accompanied by
lightly buttered haricots verts, followed by a simple green salad, fruit and
mixed cheeses, espresso, and a sliver of apricot tartcomplemented by a
delicate Chablis and, to finish, a noble but little-known Armagnac. Then,
without a quiver, and without so much as having seen any food, Baudrillard
languidly calls for his check, says a gracious farewell to the matre dhotel,
and departs, having consumed the signs of a satisfying repast and fulfilled
all the essential requirements of symbolic exchange . Disdain quantitative measures and
hard evidence. Spin elaborate theories out of a few anecdotes. Baudrillard cannot afford to concede the validity of
empirical standards of proof, for to do so would invite a great many unsettling questions. Exactly how, for example, is my
grandmothers need to sleep caused by the manufacture of beds? Does her sleepiness increase with a rising rate of box
spring production? Anyone can see that this kind of thinking might lead directly to science, which Baudrillard considers
merely a system of defense and imposed ignorance. For him, positivism, that hereditary curse of the Enlightenment,
sets up criteria which, in their alleged objectivity, create a false reality by excluding whatever does not conform to a
limiting, conventionalizing language: the object of a (given) science is only the effect of its discourse.
If they are right that our actions and intellects are
poisoned by an oversaturation with information, how do
they propose to free us from that? It is not just
information that mattersthe context and content of
information is VITAL to our understanding and strategies
of resistance. Their seductive play undermines the
ideological commitments of information saturation
because it explicitly refuses to engage with them---they
make the problem worse
Douglas Kellner 3, George F. Kneller Philosophy of Education Chair in the
Graduate School of Education at UCLA, Baudrillard: A New McLuhan?,
Illuminations, 2003, http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell26.htm
Undoubtedly, the media are playing an ever greater role in our personal and social lives, and have dramatically transformed our economy, polity, and society in ways that we are only now becoming aware of.
Living within a great transformation, perhaps as significant as the transformation from feudalism to industrial capitalism, we are engaged in a process of dramatic mutation, which we are barely beginning to
understand, as we enter the brave new world of media saturation, computerization, new technologies, and new discourses. Baudrillard's contribution lies in his calling attention to these novelties and
are having quite the impact that Baudrillard ascribes to them and whether his theory provides
adequate concepts to analyze the complex interactions between media, culture, and society today. In this section, I shall suggest that Baudrillard's media theory is vitiated by three subordinations which
limitations in
undermine its theoretical and political usefulness and which raise questions as well about the status of postmodern social theory. I shall suggest that the
Baudrillard subordinates
, like McLuhan, privileges the form of media technology over what might be called the media apparatus, and thus
argue that the use and effects of media should be carefully examined and
evaluated in terms of specific contexts. Distinctions between
context and use, form and content, media and reality , all
dissolve, however, in Baudrillard's one-dimensional theory
where global theses and glib pronouncements replace careful
analysis and critique . Baudrillard might retort that it is the media themselves which abstract from the concreteness of everyday, social, and political life and
media analysis
provide abstract simulacra of actual events which themselves become more real than "the real" which they supposedly represent. Yet even if this is so,
critique , and against his claims that media content are irrelevant and unimportant, I would propose grasping the dialectic of form and content in media communication, seeing how media
forms constitute content and how content is always formed or structured, while forms themselves can be ideological, as when the situation comedy form of conflict/resolution projects an ideological vision
which shows all problems easily capable of being resolved within the existing society, or when action-adventure series formats of violent conflict as the essence of reality project a conservative view of human
life as a battleground where only the fittest survive and prosper.[12] For a dialectical theory of the media, television would have multiple functions (and potential decodings) where sometimes the ideological
effects may be predominant while at other times time functions a medium like television functions as mere noise or through the merely formal effects which Baudrillard puts at the center of his analysis.
For Baudrillard,
reality. , the media constitute a simulated,
by contrast today simply
hyperreal, and obscene world(view (in his technical sense) ), and a dialectic of media and society is shortcircuited in a new version