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Impossible Exchange
The uncertainty of the world lies in the fact that it has no equivalent anywhere; it cannot be exchanged for anything. The uncertainty of thought lies in the fact that it cannot be exchanged either for truth or for reality.
Jean Baudrillard’s now familiar investigations into reality and hyper-reality shift here into a more metaphysical frame. Working his way through the various spheres and systems of everyday life—the political, the juridical, the economical, the aesthetic, the biological, among others—he finds that they are all characterized by the same non-equivalence, and hence the same eccentricity. Literally, they have no meaning outside themselves and cannot be exchanged for anything. Politics is laden with signs and meanings, but seen from the outside it has no meaning. Schemes for genetic experimentation and investigation are becoming infinitely ramified, and the more ramified they become the more the crucial question is left who rules over life, who rules over death?
Baudrillard’s conclusion is that the true formula of contemporary nihilism lies the nihilism of value itself. This is our fate, and from this stem both the happiest and the most baleful consequences. This book might be said to be the exploration, first, of the ‘fateful’ consequences, and subsequently—by a poetic transference of situation—of the fortunate, happy consequences of impossible exchange.
Jean Baudrillard’s now familiar investigations into reality and hyper-reality shift here into a more metaphysical frame. Working his way through the various spheres and systems of everyday life—the political, the juridical, the economical, the aesthetic, the biological, among others—he finds that they are all characterized by the same non-equivalence, and hence the same eccentricity. Literally, they have no meaning outside themselves and cannot be exchanged for anything. Politics is laden with signs and meanings, but seen from the outside it has no meaning. Schemes for genetic experimentation and investigation are becoming infinitely ramified, and the more ramified they become the more the crucial question is left who rules over life, who rules over death?
Baudrillard’s conclusion is that the true formula of contemporary nihilism lies the nihilism of value itself. This is our fate, and from this stem both the happiest and the most baleful consequences. This book might be said to be the exploration, first, of the ‘fateful’ consequences, and subsequently—by a poetic transference of situation—of the fortunate, happy consequences of impossible exchange.
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
28 people are currently reading
621 people want to read
About the author
Jean Baudrillard
210 books1,992 followersJean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher and poet, with interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as hyperreality. Baudrillard wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, critique of economy, social history, aesthetics, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his most well-known works are Seduction (1978), Simulacra and Simulation (1981), America (1986), and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991). His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism. Nevertheless, Baudrillard had also opposed post-structuralism, and had distanced himself from postmodernism.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
August 31, 2017
AAAAaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaa
August 4, 2014
Impossible Exchange is exemplary "late" Baudrillard.
... it has a slick coffee table appeal; one could imagine it perching unobtrusively on the expensive glass-topped surface of a yuppie coffee table, a signifier of culture for those who Baudrillard is actively writing against.
... it has a slick coffee table appeal; one could imagine it perching unobtrusively on the expensive glass-topped surface of a yuppie coffee table, a signifier of culture for those who Baudrillard is actively writing against.
September 26, 2019
FINALLY IT’S DONE IM SO FAHAJAHAHAJAH
In other news, I started to like it around the part talking about cloning and the ‘freedom from free-will and liberty’, it was fun.
In other news, I started to like it around the part talking about cloning and the ‘freedom from free-will and liberty’, it was fun.
January 9, 2015
Lots to chew on: science, illusion, the meaning of the world; politics, representation, art, and being real. Great read!
Ultimately, science has never stopped churning out a reassuring scenario in which the world is being progressively deciphered by the advances of reason. This was the hypothesis with which we ‘discovered’ the world, atoms, molecules, particles, viruses and so forth. But no one has advanced the hypothesis that things may discover us at the same time as we discover them, and that there is a dual relationship in discovery. This is because we do not see the object in its originality. We see it as a passive, as waiting to be discovered -- a bit like America being discovered by the Spaniards. But things are not like that. When the subject discovers the object -- whether that object is viruses or primitive societies -- the converse, and never innocent, discovery is also made: the discovery of the subject by the object. Today, they say that science no longer ‘discovers’ its object but ‘invents’ it. We should say, then, that the object, too, does more than just ‘discover’ us; it invents us purely and simply -- it thinks us. It seems that we have victoriously wrenched the object from its peaceful state, from its indifference and the secrecy which enshrouded it. But today, before our very eyes, the enigmatic nature of the world is rousing itself, resolved to struggle to retain its mystery. Knowledge is a duel. And this duel between subject and object brings with it the subject’s loss of sovereignty, making the object itself the horizon of its disappearance.
For reality, it is all merely a superficial and provisional ‘enframing’ [Gestell] in the Heideggerian sense. Reality itself has become simulative, and leaves us with a sense of its fundamental unintelligibility, which has nothing mystical about it, but would seem, rather, to be ironic. Having reached the paroxystic state (which is, as the name implies, the state just before the end), reality slips over of its own accord into the parodic -- irony and parody being the last glimmer reality sends out to us before disappearing, the last sign the object sends out to us from the depths of its mystery.
The object-thought is no longer reflective, but reversible.
Object-thought, thought become inhuman, is the form of thinking which actually comes to terms with impossible exchange. It no longer attempts to interpret the world, nor to exchange it for ideas; it has opted for uncertainty, which becomes its rule. It becomes the thinking of the world thinking us. In so doing, it changes the course of the world. For though there is no there is no possible equivalence between thought and the world, there does occur, beyond any critical point of view, a reciprocal alteration between matter and thought. So the situation is reversed; if, once, the subject constituted an event in the world of the object, today the object constitutes an event in the universe ofo the subject. If the sudden emergence of consciousness constituted an event in the course of the world, today the world constitutes an event in the course of consciousness, in so far as it now forms part of its material destiny, part of the destiny of matter, and hence of its radical uncertainty.
Physical alteration of the world by consciousness, metaphysical alteration of consciousness by the world; there is no cause to ask where this begins, or ‘who thinks whom.’ Each is simultaneously in play, and each deflects the other from its goal. Has not humanity, with its inborn consciousness, its ambiguity, its symbolic order and its power of illusion, ended up altering the universe, affecting or infecting it with its own uncertainty? Has it not ended up contaminating the world (of which it is, nevertheless, an integral part) with its non-being, its way of not-being-in-the-world?
We have lost the original. The destiny of the individual soul has lost much of its grandeur. In the past, the human being was not doomed to be merely what he is. God and Satan wrestled over him. In the past, we were important enough to have a battle fought over our souls. Today, our salvation is our own affair. Our lives are no longer marked by original sin but by the risk of failing to fulfil their ultimate potential; so we accumulate plans, ideals and programmes; we constantly pass the buck and seek to outdo each other in a universal effort to perform. And we subside into the condition of those who, as Kierkegaard put it, are no longer capable of facing the Last Judgement in person.
Since no one fights over our souls any longer, it is up to us to fight over ourselves, to put our own existences on the line, to be endlessly trying things out and competing in a perpetual, infernal contesting of ourselves -- though there is no Last Judgement anymore, and there are no longer any real rules.
In the final stage of his ‘liberation’ and emancipation through the networks, screens and new technologies, the modern individual becomes a fractal subject, but subdivisible to infinity and indivisible, closed on himself and doomed to endless identity. In a sense, the perfect subject, the subject without other -- whose individuation is therefore not at all contradictory with mass status. Quite the contrary, indeed: he is the dispersal of the mass-effect into each individual parcel -- each encapsulating in itself the seriality, the crazed [étoile], metonymic structure of the mass, the characteristic feature of which is that it is at any one point substitutable for itself. Or, alternatively, the individual himself forms a mass -- the mass structure being present, as in a hologram, in each individual fragment. In the virtual and media world, the mass and the individual are merely electronic extensions of each other. We have thus become virtual monads, free electrons, individuals left to ourselves, desperately seeking the other. But the particle has no other. The other particle is always the same. All that can exist is an anti-particle, which, on impact, would make the first particle disappear. Perhaps this is the only last eventuality there is: the destiny of the disappearance of matter into anti-matter, of sex into the other sex, of the individual into the mass. Reduced to nuclear identity, we no longer have any alternative destiny except a collision with our antagonistic double. This is, pretty much, the curse which afflicts the species -- this latter breaking up first into individuals, then these in their turn breaking up into scattered particles by a process of inexorable fragmentation. Like matter, which saw itself split first into atoms, then into increasingly elusive particles -- in such a way that you sense there will never be a final, truly elementary stage of matter, any more than there will be a definitive reference stage of the human being.
* * *
It gradually dawns on you that you have only to look at the political and social world to see that it is made up of countless parallel, ‘rigged’ careers, of speculation and crookery which is never denounced, of perfectly impenetrable insider deals, of mystifications we shall never see unmasked.
May 1968 was still faithful in its gestures and speech to that cultural rhetoric (which in no way detracts from the symbolic violence of the event). Our age, however, is no longer capable of providing a stage and actors. We shall even seem faintly ridiculous to those who come after us, in the way 1950s characters do to us. We have thrown off that old existential garb.
Then there is nothing to rule out the paradoxical hypothesis that it is indeed our thought which governs the world, on condition that we first think that it is the world which thinks us.
Homogenize and integrate as much as you like; separation will still occur.
Any regime of control and prohibition creates an irregular, clandestine, anomalous situation: a black market. Prohibition and its consequences has become nature to our system.
Everything -- or, at least, most essential things -- already takes place outside the official circuits. And there is something heartening about this. There is something spiritual in this double game, in this perversion which resists any normalization, in these occult structures which flout established authority, in this black market of the social. And, in any case, what hope would there be for a society that had purged itself of all clandestinity? In the end, the last word goes to Mandeville, for whom the social body operates only through its immorality and its vices -- but that immorality cannot be acknowledged: it, too, is part of the black market in truth.
This thoroughgoing dissociation of all the forms of society amounts to a veritable silent insurrection. It provides an echo of those peoples exiled behind the mirrors by the victorious Emperor, destined in the future to be merely a reflection of their conqueror. But one day, says Borges, these subject peoples begin to look less and less like their masters. They end up breaking the mirrors and bursting forth into the empire, laying waste to it. Soe we see entire populations rebelling -- albeit in some cases silently -- against the principle of representation. For them, the exercise of that particular freedom has become enforced bitpart playing and a shabby hoax.
This is a very deep rebellion, which goes to the heart of the political system. What interest does the modern individual have in being represented -- the individual of the networks and the virtual, the multifocal individual of the operational sphere? He does his business, and that is that. What does he care for transcendence? He lives very well in immanence and interaction. What does a political will mean to him, a collective will, that glimmer of sovereignty he delegated to the social organization? There is no longer any delegation of the will, or of desire. The screen of communication has smashed the mirror of representation. Now only statistical shaws circulate - on the opinion-poll screens. There is no social contract any longer: on the media screens, only the image-play-back functions. The citizen’s only symbolic capital is that of his disaffection and political poverty, that very poverty managed by our official representatives (that is the secret of their corruption).
The political insurrection of people who no longer want to be represented, the silent insurrection of things which no longer want to signify anything. The contract of signification - that kind of social contract between things and their signs - itself seems broken, like the political contract, with the result that we find it increasingly hard to represent the world to ourselves and decipher its meaning. Things themselves rebel against decipherment - or perhaps we no longer wish to decipher them? It is the very imagining of meaning that is sick.
Yet we still play-act representation. A good illustration was provided by the Kassel Documenta of 1997 with ‘Pigsty’ Installation ~ a work by Carsten Höller and Rosemarie Trockel, ‘Ein Haus für Schweine und Menschen’ ( A House for Pigs and People).
Not only do people no longer want to be represented, they do not even want to be ‘liberated.’ Liberated from what, and in terms of what? To say what they have to say, they do not need to be represented. To be what they are, they no longer even need to recognize themselves as such.
Cioran has written: What a pity that to find God you have to go via faith!
What still distinguishes the functioning of human beings from that of machines is the intoxication of functioning, of living - pleasure. All kinds of aids can increase human pleasure, but human beings cannot invent any that would feel pleasure like themselves, or better than themselves - that would feel pleasure in their stead.
Leaving intelligence to machines is, in teh end, relinquishing the responsibility of knowing, just as leaving it to politicians to govern us relieves us of the responsibility of power.
...you do not belong to yourself. What one is, one does not have; and what one does not have, one cannot sell.
Lacan: love is giving what you do not have -- that is to say, what you are, which no one has at their disposal.
The best way to seduce is still to have someone do something in your stead: he or she will then keep on coming back to occupy that place.
Cioran says: we are not failures until we believe life has a meaning -- and from that point on, we are all failures, because it hasn’t.
Money becomes the universal transcription of a world bereft of meaning. This fetish money, around which global speculation revolves - far about and beyond the reproduction of capital - has nothing to do with wealth or the production of wealth. It expresses the breakdown of meaning, the impossibility of exchanging the world for its meaning, and at the same time, the need to transfigure that impossibility into a sign of some kind - indeed of the most nondescript kind: the sign which will best express the meaninglessness of the world.
If you wanted to put a brake on the total extrapolation of the world into money, you would first have to eliminate the demand for meaning. We are thus torn between the imagining of meaning, the demand for truth, and the increasingly probably hypothesis that the world has no final truth, that it is a definitive illusion. Money allows us to find a universal compromise.
Money might be said to be the equivalent of the universal circulation of the Nothing.
There are 2 ways of breaking the law: to deny it or to be seized with a passion for it.
Most current photographs merely reflect the ‘objective’ misery of the human condition. The more we are told about poverty and violence, and presented with them openly, the less effect they have on us. This is the law of the imaginary. The image has to affect us on its own account, to impose its specific illusion, its original language, for any content whatsoever to move us. For there to be an affective transference onto the real, we need the counter-transference of the image, and we need that counter-transference to be resolved.
We deplore the disappearance of the real, arguing that everything is now mediated by the image. But we forget that the image, too, disappears, overcome by reality. What is sacrificed in this operation is not so much the real as the image, which is dispossessed of its originality and doomed to a shameful complicity. Rather than lament the loss of a reality surrendered to the superficiality of the image, we should lament the loss of an image surrendered to the expression of the real. It is only by freeing the image from teh real that we shall restore its potency, and it is only by restoring to the image its specificity (its idiotie’ as Clément Rosset has it) that the real itself can recover its true image.
This so-called realist photography does not capture what is but, rather, what should not be: the reality of destitution. For preference, it photographs not what exists but what, from a moral, humanitarian viewpoint, should not exist - while making perfectly immoral aesthetic and commercial use of this misery. It is a photography which attests not so much to the real as to a profound disavowal of its object, and also a disavowal of the image, which is assigned to represent what does not wish to be represented, assigned to commit a ‘rape of the real.’ So the cult of the image at all costs most often entails an unhappy destiny for the image, namely, the fate of imprisoning the real in its reality principle, where the point is to free the real from its reality principle. Instead of this, we have been inoculated with the realist virus of the image. Every time we are photographed, we spontaneously size up the photography as he in turn takes stock of us. And ‘savages’, to spontaneously adopt a pose. Everything strikes a pose in an imaginary reconciliation.
Mike Disfarmer’s photographs of Arkansas farmers from the 1940s and 1950s: people of lowly origins, posing conscientiously, almost ceremoniously, and the lens doesn’t attempt to surprise or understand them. There is no pursuit of ‘naturalness,’ but no idea what they should look like either. They are what they are, and they do not smile.
The image reveals not something moral or related to ‘objective’ conditions, but that which remains indecipherable within each one of us; it is not of the order of reality but of the evil genius of reality, happy or otherwise. It is that which is of the order of the inhuman within us, and bears no witness to anything.
Photography appeared as a technical medium in an age - the industrial era - when reality began to disappear.
All our technologies - fatal progeny that they are - arise from teh progressive extenuation of reality.
The world lacks nothing before being thought, but thereafter, it can be explained only on that basis.
Thought as illusion, as seduction, is no doubt an imposture. But imposture (and language itself is one) is not the opposite of truth: it is a more subtle truth which enwraps the former in a sign of its parody and its erasure.
In the end, what is the point of thought, what is the point of theory. Between them and the world, it is a relationship of ‘the Other by itself’ [L'Autre par lui-même’]: suspense and reversibility, an asymmetrical duel between the world and thought. Bear in mind three basic theorems:
The world was given to us as something enigmatic and unintelligible, and the task of thought is to make it, if possible, even more enigmatic and unintelligible.
Since the world is evolving towards a frenzied state of affairs, we have to take a frenzied view of it.
The player must never be bigger than the game itself, nor the theorist bigger than theory, nor the theory bigger than the world itself.
Ultimately, science has never stopped churning out a reassuring scenario in which the world is being progressively deciphered by the advances of reason. This was the hypothesis with which we ‘discovered’ the world, atoms, molecules, particles, viruses and so forth. But no one has advanced the hypothesis that things may discover us at the same time as we discover them, and that there is a dual relationship in discovery. This is because we do not see the object in its originality. We see it as a passive, as waiting to be discovered -- a bit like America being discovered by the Spaniards. But things are not like that. When the subject discovers the object -- whether that object is viruses or primitive societies -- the converse, and never innocent, discovery is also made: the discovery of the subject by the object. Today, they say that science no longer ‘discovers’ its object but ‘invents’ it. We should say, then, that the object, too, does more than just ‘discover’ us; it invents us purely and simply -- it thinks us. It seems that we have victoriously wrenched the object from its peaceful state, from its indifference and the secrecy which enshrouded it. But today, before our very eyes, the enigmatic nature of the world is rousing itself, resolved to struggle to retain its mystery. Knowledge is a duel. And this duel between subject and object brings with it the subject’s loss of sovereignty, making the object itself the horizon of its disappearance.
For reality, it is all merely a superficial and provisional ‘enframing’ [Gestell] in the Heideggerian sense. Reality itself has become simulative, and leaves us with a sense of its fundamental unintelligibility, which has nothing mystical about it, but would seem, rather, to be ironic. Having reached the paroxystic state (which is, as the name implies, the state just before the end), reality slips over of its own accord into the parodic -- irony and parody being the last glimmer reality sends out to us before disappearing, the last sign the object sends out to us from the depths of its mystery.
The object-thought is no longer reflective, but reversible.
Object-thought, thought become inhuman, is the form of thinking which actually comes to terms with impossible exchange. It no longer attempts to interpret the world, nor to exchange it for ideas; it has opted for uncertainty, which becomes its rule. It becomes the thinking of the world thinking us. In so doing, it changes the course of the world. For though there is no there is no possible equivalence between thought and the world, there does occur, beyond any critical point of view, a reciprocal alteration between matter and thought. So the situation is reversed; if, once, the subject constituted an event in the world of the object, today the object constitutes an event in the universe ofo the subject. If the sudden emergence of consciousness constituted an event in the course of the world, today the world constitutes an event in the course of consciousness, in so far as it now forms part of its material destiny, part of the destiny of matter, and hence of its radical uncertainty.
Physical alteration of the world by consciousness, metaphysical alteration of consciousness by the world; there is no cause to ask where this begins, or ‘who thinks whom.’ Each is simultaneously in play, and each deflects the other from its goal. Has not humanity, with its inborn consciousness, its ambiguity, its symbolic order and its power of illusion, ended up altering the universe, affecting or infecting it with its own uncertainty? Has it not ended up contaminating the world (of which it is, nevertheless, an integral part) with its non-being, its way of not-being-in-the-world?
We have lost the original. The destiny of the individual soul has lost much of its grandeur. In the past, the human being was not doomed to be merely what he is. God and Satan wrestled over him. In the past, we were important enough to have a battle fought over our souls. Today, our salvation is our own affair. Our lives are no longer marked by original sin but by the risk of failing to fulfil their ultimate potential; so we accumulate plans, ideals and programmes; we constantly pass the buck and seek to outdo each other in a universal effort to perform. And we subside into the condition of those who, as Kierkegaard put it, are no longer capable of facing the Last Judgement in person.
Since no one fights over our souls any longer, it is up to us to fight over ourselves, to put our own existences on the line, to be endlessly trying things out and competing in a perpetual, infernal contesting of ourselves -- though there is no Last Judgement anymore, and there are no longer any real rules.
In the final stage of his ‘liberation’ and emancipation through the networks, screens and new technologies, the modern individual becomes a fractal subject, but subdivisible to infinity and indivisible, closed on himself and doomed to endless identity. In a sense, the perfect subject, the subject without other -- whose individuation is therefore not at all contradictory with mass status. Quite the contrary, indeed: he is the dispersal of the mass-effect into each individual parcel -- each encapsulating in itself the seriality, the crazed [étoile], metonymic structure of the mass, the characteristic feature of which is that it is at any one point substitutable for itself. Or, alternatively, the individual himself forms a mass -- the mass structure being present, as in a hologram, in each individual fragment. In the virtual and media world, the mass and the individual are merely electronic extensions of each other. We have thus become virtual monads, free electrons, individuals left to ourselves, desperately seeking the other. But the particle has no other. The other particle is always the same. All that can exist is an anti-particle, which, on impact, would make the first particle disappear. Perhaps this is the only last eventuality there is: the destiny of the disappearance of matter into anti-matter, of sex into the other sex, of the individual into the mass. Reduced to nuclear identity, we no longer have any alternative destiny except a collision with our antagonistic double. This is, pretty much, the curse which afflicts the species -- this latter breaking up first into individuals, then these in their turn breaking up into scattered particles by a process of inexorable fragmentation. Like matter, which saw itself split first into atoms, then into increasingly elusive particles -- in such a way that you sense there will never be a final, truly elementary stage of matter, any more than there will be a definitive reference stage of the human being.
* * *
It gradually dawns on you that you have only to look at the political and social world to see that it is made up of countless parallel, ‘rigged’ careers, of speculation and crookery which is never denounced, of perfectly impenetrable insider deals, of mystifications we shall never see unmasked.
May 1968 was still faithful in its gestures and speech to that cultural rhetoric (which in no way detracts from the symbolic violence of the event). Our age, however, is no longer capable of providing a stage and actors. We shall even seem faintly ridiculous to those who come after us, in the way 1950s characters do to us. We have thrown off that old existential garb.
Then there is nothing to rule out the paradoxical hypothesis that it is indeed our thought which governs the world, on condition that we first think that it is the world which thinks us.
Homogenize and integrate as much as you like; separation will still occur.
Any regime of control and prohibition creates an irregular, clandestine, anomalous situation: a black market. Prohibition and its consequences has become nature to our system.
Everything -- or, at least, most essential things -- already takes place outside the official circuits. And there is something heartening about this. There is something spiritual in this double game, in this perversion which resists any normalization, in these occult structures which flout established authority, in this black market of the social. And, in any case, what hope would there be for a society that had purged itself of all clandestinity? In the end, the last word goes to Mandeville, for whom the social body operates only through its immorality and its vices -- but that immorality cannot be acknowledged: it, too, is part of the black market in truth.
This thoroughgoing dissociation of all the forms of society amounts to a veritable silent insurrection. It provides an echo of those peoples exiled behind the mirrors by the victorious Emperor, destined in the future to be merely a reflection of their conqueror. But one day, says Borges, these subject peoples begin to look less and less like their masters. They end up breaking the mirrors and bursting forth into the empire, laying waste to it. Soe we see entire populations rebelling -- albeit in some cases silently -- against the principle of representation. For them, the exercise of that particular freedom has become enforced bitpart playing and a shabby hoax.
This is a very deep rebellion, which goes to the heart of the political system. What interest does the modern individual have in being represented -- the individual of the networks and the virtual, the multifocal individual of the operational sphere? He does his business, and that is that. What does he care for transcendence? He lives very well in immanence and interaction. What does a political will mean to him, a collective will, that glimmer of sovereignty he delegated to the social organization? There is no longer any delegation of the will, or of desire. The screen of communication has smashed the mirror of representation. Now only statistical shaws circulate - on the opinion-poll screens. There is no social contract any longer: on the media screens, only the image-play-back functions. The citizen’s only symbolic capital is that of his disaffection and political poverty, that very poverty managed by our official representatives (that is the secret of their corruption).
The political insurrection of people who no longer want to be represented, the silent insurrection of things which no longer want to signify anything. The contract of signification - that kind of social contract between things and their signs - itself seems broken, like the political contract, with the result that we find it increasingly hard to represent the world to ourselves and decipher its meaning. Things themselves rebel against decipherment - or perhaps we no longer wish to decipher them? It is the very imagining of meaning that is sick.
Yet we still play-act representation. A good illustration was provided by the Kassel Documenta of 1997 with ‘Pigsty’ Installation ~ a work by Carsten Höller and Rosemarie Trockel, ‘Ein Haus für Schweine und Menschen’ ( A House for Pigs and People).
Not only do people no longer want to be represented, they do not even want to be ‘liberated.’ Liberated from what, and in terms of what? To say what they have to say, they do not need to be represented. To be what they are, they no longer even need to recognize themselves as such.
Cioran has written: What a pity that to find God you have to go via faith!
What still distinguishes the functioning of human beings from that of machines is the intoxication of functioning, of living - pleasure. All kinds of aids can increase human pleasure, but human beings cannot invent any that would feel pleasure like themselves, or better than themselves - that would feel pleasure in their stead.
Leaving intelligence to machines is, in teh end, relinquishing the responsibility of knowing, just as leaving it to politicians to govern us relieves us of the responsibility of power.
...you do not belong to yourself. What one is, one does not have; and what one does not have, one cannot sell.
Lacan: love is giving what you do not have -- that is to say, what you are, which no one has at their disposal.
The best way to seduce is still to have someone do something in your stead: he or she will then keep on coming back to occupy that place.
Cioran says: we are not failures until we believe life has a meaning -- and from that point on, we are all failures, because it hasn’t.
Money becomes the universal transcription of a world bereft of meaning. This fetish money, around which global speculation revolves - far about and beyond the reproduction of capital - has nothing to do with wealth or the production of wealth. It expresses the breakdown of meaning, the impossibility of exchanging the world for its meaning, and at the same time, the need to transfigure that impossibility into a sign of some kind - indeed of the most nondescript kind: the sign which will best express the meaninglessness of the world.
If you wanted to put a brake on the total extrapolation of the world into money, you would first have to eliminate the demand for meaning. We are thus torn between the imagining of meaning, the demand for truth, and the increasingly probably hypothesis that the world has no final truth, that it is a definitive illusion. Money allows us to find a universal compromise.
Money might be said to be the equivalent of the universal circulation of the Nothing.
There are 2 ways of breaking the law: to deny it or to be seized with a passion for it.
Most current photographs merely reflect the ‘objective’ misery of the human condition. The more we are told about poverty and violence, and presented with them openly, the less effect they have on us. This is the law of the imaginary. The image has to affect us on its own account, to impose its specific illusion, its original language, for any content whatsoever to move us. For there to be an affective transference onto the real, we need the counter-transference of the image, and we need that counter-transference to be resolved.
We deplore the disappearance of the real, arguing that everything is now mediated by the image. But we forget that the image, too, disappears, overcome by reality. What is sacrificed in this operation is not so much the real as the image, which is dispossessed of its originality and doomed to a shameful complicity. Rather than lament the loss of a reality surrendered to the superficiality of the image, we should lament the loss of an image surrendered to the expression of the real. It is only by freeing the image from teh real that we shall restore its potency, and it is only by restoring to the image its specificity (its idiotie’ as Clément Rosset has it) that the real itself can recover its true image.
This so-called realist photography does not capture what is but, rather, what should not be: the reality of destitution. For preference, it photographs not what exists but what, from a moral, humanitarian viewpoint, should not exist - while making perfectly immoral aesthetic and commercial use of this misery. It is a photography which attests not so much to the real as to a profound disavowal of its object, and also a disavowal of the image, which is assigned to represent what does not wish to be represented, assigned to commit a ‘rape of the real.’ So the cult of the image at all costs most often entails an unhappy destiny for the image, namely, the fate of imprisoning the real in its reality principle, where the point is to free the real from its reality principle. Instead of this, we have been inoculated with the realist virus of the image. Every time we are photographed, we spontaneously size up the photography as he in turn takes stock of us. And ‘savages’, to spontaneously adopt a pose. Everything strikes a pose in an imaginary reconciliation.
Mike Disfarmer’s photographs of Arkansas farmers from the 1940s and 1950s: people of lowly origins, posing conscientiously, almost ceremoniously, and the lens doesn’t attempt to surprise or understand them. There is no pursuit of ‘naturalness,’ but no idea what they should look like either. They are what they are, and they do not smile.
The image reveals not something moral or related to ‘objective’ conditions, but that which remains indecipherable within each one of us; it is not of the order of reality but of the evil genius of reality, happy or otherwise. It is that which is of the order of the inhuman within us, and bears no witness to anything.
Photography appeared as a technical medium in an age - the industrial era - when reality began to disappear.
All our technologies - fatal progeny that they are - arise from teh progressive extenuation of reality.
The world lacks nothing before being thought, but thereafter, it can be explained only on that basis.
Thought as illusion, as seduction, is no doubt an imposture. But imposture (and language itself is one) is not the opposite of truth: it is a more subtle truth which enwraps the former in a sign of its parody and its erasure.
In the end, what is the point of thought, what is the point of theory. Between them and the world, it is a relationship of ‘the Other by itself’ [L'Autre par lui-même’]: suspense and reversibility, an asymmetrical duel between the world and thought. Bear in mind three basic theorems:
The world was given to us as something enigmatic and unintelligible, and the task of thought is to make it, if possible, even more enigmatic and unintelligible.
Since the world is evolving towards a frenzied state of affairs, we have to take a frenzied view of it.
The player must never be bigger than the game itself, nor the theorist bigger than theory, nor the theory bigger than the world itself.
September 28, 2023
Good, I think? In parts indecipherable, but with many moments of excellent lucidity and contemporary relevance.
April 6, 2024
Don't ask me what I just read but it was fire. Baudrillard talks about the symbolic world, causal reversal and the primordial death drive - and that's in the first few pages. Another banger from my favourite french intellectual/wizard/crackhead.
Rereading #1:
"Leaving intelligence to machines is, in the
end, relinquishing the responsibility of knowing, just as leaving it to politicians to govern us relieves us of the responsibility of power. "
I've come back to this thought provoking work which seeks to introduce the concept of an "impossible exchange" — exchange which is both impossible and yet happens anyway. Baudrillard has his finger on the pulse of the future, and foresees a world where technology is so perfected that humans become obsolete, where our world becomes virtual in all its facets. He seems to speak from the future emanating back into our present with uncanny prescience. Not everything is doom and gloom: there is still room for play and thought here. With the complete and total integration of the world and technology, thought becomes free to be useless. Always the nihilist, Baudrillard does not prescribe a way out. There is still a way of living after the end of everything.
Rereading #1:
"Leaving intelligence to machines is, in the
end, relinquishing the responsibility of knowing, just as leaving it to politicians to govern us relieves us of the responsibility of power. "
I've come back to this thought provoking work which seeks to introduce the concept of an "impossible exchange" — exchange which is both impossible and yet happens anyway. Baudrillard has his finger on the pulse of the future, and foresees a world where technology is so perfected that humans become obsolete, where our world becomes virtual in all its facets. He seems to speak from the future emanating back into our present with uncanny prescience. Not everything is doom and gloom: there is still room for play and thought here. With the complete and total integration of the world and technology, thought becomes free to be useless. Always the nihilist, Baudrillard does not prescribe a way out. There is still a way of living after the end of everything.
February 12, 2014
Ladies and gentleman, Baudrillard proclaimeth we are in the realm of the hyper-real. I can feel it as I am typing right now, so I find his analysis to be acceptable. Yet what distinguishes the World, ya know, The World, is its inability to be wholly reproduced. Yet we are left with all these duplicates...Baudrillard analyzes these duplicates and duplicities in a cunning and manageable way...ends up towards the end of the book championing...photography? Obviously pre-instagram.
In conclusion, to be real you cannot be reproduced, yet in the matrix umm...none of us is real, every gesture is an inescapable reproduction. (Yet his theory is not as bleak to read as I am making it sound). And he would contend, the matrix (hyper-real) is real enough to us, and we can only theorize and exist in This World, so don't go about thinking you are The One to escape the matrix just because You read alternative news sources.
In conclusion, to be real you cannot be reproduced, yet in the matrix umm...none of us is real, every gesture is an inescapable reproduction. (Yet his theory is not as bleak to read as I am making it sound). And he would contend, the matrix (hyper-real) is real enough to us, and we can only theorize and exist in This World, so don't go about thinking you are The One to escape the matrix just because You read alternative news sources.
October 24, 2018
Etkileyici kitap. Konular ilgi çekici kitabı 1 solukta okudum fakat farklı dönemlerde yeniden yeniden okunası .
August 30, 2020
Mostly blablabla with some feeble sparks of ideas. Nothing in comparison with his chef-d'œuvre Simulation and Simulacra. Why wouldn't you keep quiet when you have nothing more to say ?
October 12, 2017
I was living in Los Angeles in the early 00s when this book first sought me out. The first essay alone raised many exciting questions surrounding the nature and future of technology, and more clearly realized than most recent science fiction.
This and subsequent essays made me consider the cultural meaning of human activities now made obsolete by technology, as well as the various consumer/cultural endgames we seem to be racing toward, especially if certain economic-governmental models are to continue to propagate.
I re-read this book after processing more of Baudrillard's other work, and certainly feel the impact on my thinking and writing.
A great book if you are newer to Baudrillard, especially if you have already read S&S, and are going a little further.
This and subsequent essays made me consider the cultural meaning of human activities now made obsolete by technology, as well as the various consumer/cultural endgames we seem to be racing toward, especially if certain economic-governmental models are to continue to propagate.
I re-read this book after processing more of Baudrillard's other work, and certainly feel the impact on my thinking and writing.
A great book if you are newer to Baudrillard, especially if you have already read S&S, and are going a little further.
November 30, 2015
Baudrillard presents a fascinating way of viewing the world, however, he is terrible at communication. I do not believe that good ideas need to hide behind a verbose wall of impenetrable nonsense. Once you wade through his nonsense, the ideas really stick and force you to see the world a little different.
A strange side note, this book gave me incredible insights into the book "Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy.
A strange side note, this book gave me incredible insights into the book "Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy.
December 2, 2010
With Bataille's *Theory of Religion*, my bible. Call it the Second Testament. (Or, as Ali G. puts it, the Second Testicle.) A must-read for anyone even vaguely afraid of/mesmerized by science and futurism.
March 25, 2020
One of few thinkers whose contagious/convincing language forces me to feel depressive and it is not because of him but the situation we are in. Please, don't preach and sulk too much, "the philosopher should be a dancer" (Nietzsche), no?!
February 4, 2023
There was an advertisement that manipulated us, you will remember, "Give life to the economy!" slogan... This slogan is like a brief summary of how the established system works. Even within the system, even the system itself is open to exchange. As long as the shopping takes place... Everything exists or does not exist on the basis of its value. This is now reflected in the relations between people, as Decently as in goods and commodities. Everything in the system can be traded, and how a price if you have to consume all that significant if it is outside the system, outside the law is so out of everything that is just as valuable material. Also, the economy is such a swallowing element that even outside the system today, it has become a Sunday space, a clearing space. Therefore, the economic system has reached its satisfaction point, says Baudrillard. An economy that can buy and sell everything cannot only buy and sell itself. Because there is no field above or outside the economy. he says that in a place where there is no super-commodity space, the economy is an absolute swallowing element. This is how Baudrillard describes the impossibility of this barter chain...
The system has definitely created a counterpart, a copy, an example of everything. In this way, since it aims to ensure the continuity of the economic cycle, it attacks with great force what it cannot create a counterpart for, and eventually defeats it as well. Likewise, he didn't get the equivalent nowadays people that create completely seized and the psycho-social field as well as social media, as well as the most characteristic uncovered the reality of people with similar identities created reductively simple by referring them to the equivalent of replication has begun now.
At this point, it won't be if I don't share that tremendous part of the book;
"He(God), by freeing man from debt thanks to the sacrifice of the son, was also making the debtor unable to pay this debt, because the creditor had already paid the debt - thus god was creating the possibility of putting this debt into circulation forever, and man was carrying it on his shoulders as a mistake that he would take on for life. This is the cunning of God. at the same time, the cunning of capital is that, on the one hand, it puts the world into an ever-increasing debt, and on the other, it tries to pay it off, so that this debt can never be completed and exchanged for anything."
It is this impossible exchange that Nietzsche mentions, quoting his saying. This chapter is a summary of this book, which is stated to be incomprehensible.
This magnificent work of Baudrillard describes today's society and human profile so beautifully that it is impossible not to fall in love with the book. I say definitely read this work.
The system has definitely created a counterpart, a copy, an example of everything. In this way, since it aims to ensure the continuity of the economic cycle, it attacks with great force what it cannot create a counterpart for, and eventually defeats it as well. Likewise, he didn't get the equivalent nowadays people that create completely seized and the psycho-social field as well as social media, as well as the most characteristic uncovered the reality of people with similar identities created reductively simple by referring them to the equivalent of replication has begun now.
At this point, it won't be if I don't share that tremendous part of the book;
"He(God), by freeing man from debt thanks to the sacrifice of the son, was also making the debtor unable to pay this debt, because the creditor had already paid the debt - thus god was creating the possibility of putting this debt into circulation forever, and man was carrying it on his shoulders as a mistake that he would take on for life. This is the cunning of God. at the same time, the cunning of capital is that, on the one hand, it puts the world into an ever-increasing debt, and on the other, it tries to pay it off, so that this debt can never be completed and exchanged for anything."
It is this impossible exchange that Nietzsche mentions, quoting his saying. This chapter is a summary of this book, which is stated to be incomprehensible.
This magnificent work of Baudrillard describes today's society and human profile so beautifully that it is impossible not to fall in love with the book. I say definitely read this work.
January 2, 2024
Baudrillard'ın "İmkansız Takas" (1999) isimli son dönem eseri; mini boy basımı bile 150 sayfayı anca yakalasa da içeriğinin muazzamlığıyla resmen bir cep Herkül'ü! "Simülakrlar ve Simülasyon" (1981) üzerine daha ne yazılabilir derken adam ötesini yapmış. 3 adet ana bölüm ve alt bölümler ile toplamda 16 bölümden oluşan bu kitap; taptaze aforizma cümleleriyle, filozofun sözlüğünden şahsına münhasır terimlerle ve karamsarlıkla örülmüş. Neyse ki kitabın olağanüstü enerjisi bu kasveti gölgede bırakıyor; aynı felsefesinin özünü oluşturduğu "MATRIX" (1999) filmi gibi...
Dünya "imkansız takas" içinde kaybolmuş; gerçek anlam ve değer, simülasyonlar ve göstergelerle yer değiştirmiş. Nesneler ve fikirler artık kendi içsel değerlerini taşımıyorlar, aksine imajlarıyla ve diğer şeyleri nasıl yansıttıklarıyla tanımlanıyorlar. Bu belirsizlik ve muğlaklık yaratmakta, sanki gerçekliğin kendisi kaybolur gibi...
Özne ve nesne bir "düello" içinde birbirine dolanmış; artık dünyanın pasif gözlemcileri falan değiliz, aktif olarak yorum ve algılarımız yoluyla onu şekillendiriyoruz. Dünya da bizi, farkında bile olmadığımız yollarla şekillendiriyor ve etkiliyor. Bu karşılıklı ilişki, kontrol gücünün konumu belirsizliğinin sürekli bir gerilimini yaratıyor. Artık bir merkez sürekliliği kaybolmuş...
Teknoloji ve medya, gerçeklik ve simülasyon arasındaki çizgileri daha da bulanıklaştırdı; sıklıkla hakikatin temsilini sakatlayan imaj bombardımanına maruz kalıyoruz. Buna sürekli maruz kalmak, gerçek anlayışımızı çarpıtabilir. Öyle ki fotoğrafçılık mesela; gerçekliğin yapay ve sansasyonel bir versiyonunu sunar hale geldi. Ve Prenses Diana'nın ölümündeki komplo teorileri, bize bol bol imaj getiren paparazzileri aklama çabamızdan başka bir şey değildi.
Tüm kasvetine rağmen Baudrillard bir miktar umut ışığı da sunuyor; Dünyayı anlamı karşılığında takas etmenin imkansızlığı bile özgürleştirici olabilir. Belirsizliği ve kaosu, yeni olasılıklar yaratmanın bir yolu olarak kucaklayabiliriz. Gerçek isyan, baskın sistemler tarafından temsil edilmeyi veya tanımlanmayı reddetmektir. Kendi eylemliliğimizi ve yaratıcılığımızı geri kazanarak belki de daha otantik ve anlamlı bir varoluş yaratabiliriz.
Dünya "imkansız takas" içinde kaybolmuş; gerçek anlam ve değer, simülasyonlar ve göstergelerle yer değiştirmiş. Nesneler ve fikirler artık kendi içsel değerlerini taşımıyorlar, aksine imajlarıyla ve diğer şeyleri nasıl yansıttıklarıyla tanımlanıyorlar. Bu belirsizlik ve muğlaklık yaratmakta, sanki gerçekliğin kendisi kaybolur gibi...
Özne ve nesne bir "düello" içinde birbirine dolanmış; artık dünyanın pasif gözlemcileri falan değiliz, aktif olarak yorum ve algılarımız yoluyla onu şekillendiriyoruz. Dünya da bizi, farkında bile olmadığımız yollarla şekillendiriyor ve etkiliyor. Bu karşılıklı ilişki, kontrol gücünün konumu belirsizliğinin sürekli bir gerilimini yaratıyor. Artık bir merkez sürekliliği kaybolmuş...
Teknoloji ve medya, gerçeklik ve simülasyon arasındaki çizgileri daha da bulanıklaştırdı; sıklıkla hakikatin temsilini sakatlayan imaj bombardımanına maruz kalıyoruz. Buna sürekli maruz kalmak, gerçek anlayışımızı çarpıtabilir. Öyle ki fotoğrafçılık mesela; gerçekliğin yapay ve sansasyonel bir versiyonunu sunar hale geldi. Ve Prenses Diana'nın ölümündeki komplo teorileri, bize bol bol imaj getiren paparazzileri aklama çabamızdan başka bir şey değildi.
Tüm kasvetine rağmen Baudrillard bir miktar umut ışığı da sunuyor; Dünyayı anlamı karşılığında takas etmenin imkansızlığı bile özgürleştirici olabilir. Belirsizliği ve kaosu, yeni olasılıklar yaratmanın bir yolu olarak kucaklayabiliriz. Gerçek isyan, baskın sistemler tarafından temsil edilmeyi veya tanımlanmayı reddetmektir. Kendi eylemliliğimizi ve yaratıcılığımızı geri kazanarak belki de daha otantik ve anlamlı bir varoluş yaratabiliriz.
June 27, 2024
“Aynı anda bir parçacığın hem hızını hem de konumunu hesaplamayı imkânsız hale getiren belirsizlik ilkesi yalnızca fizik alanıyla sınırlı değil. Bilgi alanında olayın gerçekliğini ve anlamını bir arada değerlendirirken, şu ya da bu karmaşık süreçteki nedenler ile etkileri, terörist ile rehineyi (Stockholm belirtisi) ya da virüs ile hücreyi (viral patoloji) birbirinden ayırırken de aynı imkânsızlıkla karşı karşıya kalınıyor – mikroskopla yapılan deneyde özne ile nesneyi birbirinden ayırt etmek kadar imkânsız. Bizim her bir eylemimiz de, mikroskobik parçacık gibi düzensiz bir evreyi yaşıyor: Eylemlerimizin hem ereğini hem de yöntemlerini değerlendirmek imkânsız. İnsan yaşamının ederi ile onun istatistik değerini aynı anda hesaplayamıyoruz artık. Belirsizlik hayatın bütün alanlarına sızdı. Ve bütün bunlar parametrelerin karmaşıklığından değil (öyle olsaydı, eninde sonunda sonuca ulaşırdık), mevcut verilerin uzlaşmaz olmasına bağlı olarak kesin bir belirsizlik yaşanmasından kaynaklanıyor. Bizler olayın ortaya çıkışı ile tekilliğini, şeylerin görünümü ile anlamını –bu iki seçenekten birini– bir arada kavrayamıyorsak: Ya anlama hükmedip görünümleri kaçırıyoruzdur ya da anlamı kaçırıyor ve görünümleri tehlikeden koruyoruzdur. Yalnızca görünümlerin oynadığı oyun yüzünden şeyler kendi anlamlarından giderek uzaklaşıyorlar ve yorumun şiddetine direniyorlar.”
January 7, 2020
Altı çizili satırlar barındırmaktan çok, aklın gerisinde değişim yaratma yetili kitap, İmkansız Takas.
Sanırım Pessoa idi, insanın hayvandan farkını, başa çıkamadığı düşünme ve konuşma duyularının olması olarak ifade etmişti. Baudrillard da düşünceden bahsederken bir yerde buraya teğet geçiyor:
"Zaten aslında düşünce insandışının bir biçimi, şatafatlı bir fonksiyon bozukluğu değil mi?
Ve evrimin üstüne çöreklenmekle, onu kendi imgesinin tuzağına düşürmekle canlının her tür evrimine aykırı davranmış olmuyor mu?"
Sanırım Pessoa idi, insanın hayvandan farkını, başa çıkamadığı düşünme ve konuşma duyularının olması olarak ifade etmişti. Baudrillard da düşünceden bahsederken bir yerde buraya teğet geçiyor:
"Zaten aslında düşünce insandışının bir biçimi, şatafatlı bir fonksiyon bozukluğu değil mi?
Ve evrimin üstüne çöreklenmekle, onu kendi imgesinin tuzağına düşürmekle canlının her tür evrimine aykırı davranmış olmuyor mu?"
April 14, 2019
Beyin devrelerim yandı
Akmıyor
Sadece iyilik ve kötülük ilişkisini anlatan bölümü çok beğendim
Akmıyor
Sadece iyilik ve kötülük ilişkisini anlatan bölümü çok beğendim
October 29, 2021
"Just as the abandonment of all aesthetic ground rules provokes a kind of brush fire of aesthetic values, so the loss of all reference to the laws of exchange means that the market hurtles into unrestrained speculation.
The frenzy, the folly, the sheer excess are the same. The promotional ignition of art is directly linked to the impossibility of all aesthetic evaluation.
In the absence of value judgements, value goes up in flames. And it goes up in a sort of ecstasy.
There are two art markets today. One is still regulated by a hierarchy of values, even if these are already of a speculative kind. The other resembles nothing so much as floating and uncontrollable capital in the financial market: it is pure speculation, movement for movement's sake, with no apparent purpose other than to defy the law of value. This second art market has much in common with poker or potlatch - it is a kind of space opera in the hyperspace of value.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
This is the ego of the economy itself. The trading of social credit by way of signs of sign without anything maintaining the real internal validity of the object of consumption. Art is the best example of this, which is why the death of the contemporary is a way to understand the major symptoms of late stage capitalism, hyperreality, simulacrum, and simulation.
The frenzy, the folly, the sheer excess are the same. The promotional ignition of art is directly linked to the impossibility of all aesthetic evaluation.
In the absence of value judgements, value goes up in flames. And it goes up in a sort of ecstasy.
There are two art markets today. One is still regulated by a hierarchy of values, even if these are already of a speculative kind. The other resembles nothing so much as floating and uncontrollable capital in the financial market: it is pure speculation, movement for movement's sake, with no apparent purpose other than to defy the law of value. This second art market has much in common with poker or potlatch - it is a kind of space opera in the hyperspace of value.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
This is the ego of the economy itself. The trading of social credit by way of signs of sign without anything maintaining the real internal validity of the object of consumption. Art is the best example of this, which is why the death of the contemporary is a way to understand the major symptoms of late stage capitalism, hyperreality, simulacrum, and simulation.
July 16, 2007
all views on our world are something baudrillard calls "fictitious non fictions" in which we perceive events as being meaningful when in fact, their characterization are just the creative impulses behind representations and control. a chair is a chair except when it's a table. he does a good job of describing the world of simulations we live in, he compares las vegas to the rest of the world and the trick is the rest of the world is just as fake and acted out like vegas or disneyworld. i.e. what flavor of gatorade is your favorite, those flavors are just simulations of themselves. unfortunately baudrillard only paints a world on a canvas, trapping himself within his perpetual contradiction without a way out.
January 4, 2011
I partake in the simulacrum we call LIFe therefore this book is a must read.
March 15, 2012
Fairly awful. Rambling and mostly incoherent, at least to me.
July 24, 2012
Poignant as an abstract, worthless in this black-on-white thinking, repetitive piece of work. Bland thesis within itself.
February 2, 2013
Una lectura muy interesante, presentada de una forma desgarbada, acorde con lo que el autor cuenta.
April 19, 2014
Everything flows and then exists in both ways... and anything can[not] happen in the space-time-whatever in between...
May 26, 2015
interesting point of view to the existance < and reality
July 7, 2016
Baudrillard remarks the civilization's presbyopia ...
April 6, 2013
Love the book. I had to read the first 20 pages 5 times before I could grasp what he was saying.
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