Hyperreality

The Philosophy of Art & Aesthetics.

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Hyperreality

Post by e_dog » September 22nd, 2005, 7:34 pm

[first version of post erased. i don't have the patience to try to recreate it but it was better than this.]

Nietasche: God is dead.
Foucault: Man is dead.
Baudrillard: The Real is dead.

The Reality Show has confirmed Jean Baudrillard as a postmodern prophet.

The precession of simulacra is seen in the relation of disaster films and emergency simulation scenarios.

But the Real is not quite dead yet (as some Lacanians point out). it is revealed as suffering, pain itself, the impossibility of reconciliation and knowledge of the (in)human condition.
I don't think 'Therefore, I am.' Therefore, I am.

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Post by K&D » September 22nd, 2005, 9:28 pm

i fucking hate postmodernity....its a stupid philosophy to justify late capitalism, and i think there is a good...maybe not one but several...both public and private..more latter, i actually have to go read a book about postmodernity.
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Post by e_dog » September 23rd, 2005, 2:23 pm

hey K.D.

thanks for responding. you have hit on a key debate in contemporary social thought and cultural crit., what exactly IS postmodernity? and postmodernism? are they the same?

you wrote:
i fucking hate postmodernity....its a stupid philosophy to justify late capitalism
this interesting statement is quite misleading, if not confused.

as i understand it, and of course people can use these and other terms (like "modern" and even "capitalism") in different ways, but i would say that postmodernity isn't a philosophy at all. postmodernity is a state of culture; it is a historical phenomenon if it is anything at all. postmodernism, in contrast, is a philosophy about postmodernity -- or more accurately, postmodernism is a range of very different attitudes toward postmodernity some of which are actual;ly opposed to one another.

Frederick Jameson, the film and literary critic, has a book titled something like Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. on his view, postmodern art and cultural products are like a symptom of the latest version of capitalist consumer culture. but his view is a critique of that "logic" and hence he is in some sense "against" postmodernity. and yet, there are few theoretical writers who are more postmodern, in the philosophical sense, than he. (there are of course some.) thus, postmodernism as a philosophy is more of a set of themes or topics for debate rather than a set view or ideology.

this is the spirit in which Baudrillard is positioned. he is a critic of postmodernity. in fact, of all the famous so-cal;led postmodern philosophers, the only one who seems to use the term postmodern in a favorable sense is Lyotard, but he is certainly no fan of capitalism. but his conception of postmodernity is totally different from that of Jameson. Lyotard is a post-Marxist leftist, a multiculturalist who exhibits the postmodern skepticism of grand narratives / theories.
I don't think 'Therefore, I am.' Therefore, I am.

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Post by Doreen Peri » September 23rd, 2005, 2:35 pm

I never knew and always wondered what post-modernism is, also. Post means after. How can anything be more modern than modern if modern means current, present-day, & contemporary? :)

God may be dead but I'm convinced I can resurrect him.

Many men are dead but they live on in my head.

The real is not dead. It is simply on a short hiatus in the south of France. It needed a vacation. Who could blame it?

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Post by e_dog » September 23rd, 2005, 2:49 pm

'Post" does not always mean after.

When click on the tab that sys "Post Reply" is this before or after your reply?

but really,consider that the posterior of an animal is not after the animal, but its hind parts or rear end.

so postmodern could mean after the modern age or it could mean late modern.

but what is after the modern if, as you point out, modern means current or present? well, the modern age has come to be someting of a title for a particular period of history, not just a concept for the NOW that changes in time. i.e. because so many books were writen calling "the modern age" (say) the late 17th, 18th, 19th centuries and early 20th centuries, it came to be a reference to those periods, even though they are long past. since it was thought by some that the late 20th century was somehow diffeent, or that the 21st would be somehow different, than that, they called it postmodern. its a bit as if a place was called "here" and people stoped using it in the way we normally use the word and turned it into a place name "Here". language can work like that, it's nothing mysterious.
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Post by Doreen Peri » September 23rd, 2005, 3:27 pm

Here's an interesting article.

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:8x ... n&ie=UTF-8

Somebody posted it on the internet.
I didn't read it in the Post. ;)

The real is still alive and well, attempting to be realized.

God is a process.

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Post by Doreen Peri » September 23rd, 2005, 3:29 pm

http://www.msu.edu/~defores1/gre/roots/gre_rts_afx1.htm

as a prefix, post = after as in
post script (p.s.), ex post facto, post hoc, post-mortem

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Post by Doreen Peri » September 23rd, 2005, 3:31 pm

And then I found this.

http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengl ... -body.html

Postmodernism

A general and wide-ranging term which is applied to literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and cultural and literary criticism, among others. Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality. For this reason, postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal.

Postmodernism is "post" because it is denies the existence of any ultimate principles, and it lacks the optimism of there being a scientific, philosophical, or religious truth which will explain everything for everybody - a characterisitic of the so-called "modern" mind. The paradox of the postmodern position is that, in placing all principles under the scrutiny of its skepticism, it must realize that even its own principles are not beyond questioning. As the philospher Richard Tarnas states, postmodernism "cannot on its own principles ultimately justify itself any more than can the various metaphysical overviews against which the postmodern mind has defined itself."


And I don't understand one word of it, unfortunately. Now I'm more confused than I was before. ;)

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Post by e_dog » September 23rd, 2005, 4:30 pm

true, the most common sense of the particle post is after. but it is more like "after or beyond" as used in phrases of ostmetaphysical, postdisciplinary or postcolonial. but i was suggesting that we seen postmodern as "the posterior end of" modernity i.e. late modernity or the ass of modernity.

post card - after the card.
postal worker - what you become after work.

the passage you quote is too focused on the individual. not all postmodernists, and i dare say few, would subscribe to its subjective, individual focused relativism.

besides the "paradox" is not really a problem for the position stated. it can be accepted with (un)ease, as all else.
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Post by Doreen Peri » September 23rd, 2005, 4:47 pm

Actually, "postcard" and "postal worker" are different meanings of post, similar to the meaning of "post a topic" or read the Washington Post.

The verb "post" means to put something up in public view.
The noun "post" as in the name of a newspaper, means a collection of articles put in public view.
The postal worker works with the delivery of packages which are "posted," meaning sent from one place to another.

So, these words have nothing to do with the prefix "post" which you are now referring to as the ass of modernity, edog.

I must ass-imilate all of this information and get the br-ass tacks of word ass-ociations down pat, my friend, because (not to be cheeky or anything) I choose to be knowledgeable butt I am a failure at determining what knowledge can be am-assed by the rear end of a modernist?

What comes after postmodernism? What butts its way into the present? If modernism started way back in 17th century, then why didn't it change its name once it became history? Now is now, I know that and it's certainly different than the 19th century or the 18th century or the 17th century and even tres differente than the 20th century. Seems like calling anything that is happening now "modern" might make sense, but to call anything that happened before now "postmodern" is backassward.

Call me unteachable, just call me for dinner.

God is being resurrected as we speak. I am studying esoteric mysticism. He's in there somewhere. And one day, I will be just like him. ;)

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Post by K&D » September 23rd, 2005, 6:00 pm

sorry should have written moere...postmodernism gets rde of the idea of high art and low aret as being differetn, b ecause you have to take thinhgs estheticly, so the whole thing is well advertisments could be art too and i don't know theres a loss of substance that comes with postmodernism...because of the whole idea of making judgements and trying to find out the best way to live are no longer in because they are modernist...more lattgter...i'm really tired.
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Post by e_dog » September 23rd, 2005, 7:38 pm

making judgments and trying to find out the best way of how to live are not 'modernist'. these are classical themes. that may or may not carry over into 'modernism' whiuch is often understood as a crisis of meaning.

actually, because i think that Benjamin is corected in asserting that the angel of history is blown through time backwards, facing the piling horror of wreckage while blindly careening backward into the future, it may be that the backassward movement of the present-to-future movement is accurate.

Lyotard claims that the postmodern preceds the modern, namely that something is postmodern before it becomes modern.

i'd say instead, that the post in postmodern isn't the prefix post but rather more like a specificification of a generalcategory of the modern. the postmodern is a species of the modern just as a postcard is a speies of carte.

advertising IS an art, just as throwing knives is, and maybe even blackmail. art is emotional blackmail made material.
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Post by e_dog » September 26th, 2005, 7:22 pm

Jean Baudrillard, on the contemporary form of democracy, and Europe's constitution, in an opinion piece "Holy Europe" in the New Left Review (May-June 2005):

Having failed to invent another set of rules for the game, Europe has no other solution than to distend and aggrandize itself through a series of annexations, mirroring the superpower. Behind the refusal of this ‘there-is-no-alternative’ Europe lies the presentiment of a more serious annihilation than that threatened by the market and the supranational institutions: the liquidation of all real representation; after which Europe’s peoples will find themselves irrevocably consigned to the role of extras, requested to supply a rubber stamp from time to time.

Whatever the result, this referendum is no more than an episode, as Europe itself is only one more episode among others on the road to a greater loss of collective sovereignty. Beyond the figure of the passive or manipulated voter stands that of the hostage-citizen, taken captive by the ruling powers; in other words, a democratic form of state terror.
http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR26702.shtml
I don't think 'Therefore, I am.' Therefore, I am.

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Post by e_dog » May 11th, 2007, 11:25 pm

jEAN Baudrillard

died March 2007


RIP
replicants in process
I don't think 'Therefore, I am.' Therefore, I am.

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Post by stilltrucking » June 7th, 2007, 6:21 am

I will never catch up -dog
I am about five hundred years behind you
talk about post modern
Everything past the the Paleolithic is post modern to me

Rest in peace jEAN Baudrillard

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