Screened Out

by Jean Baudrillard, Chris Turner (Translator)

‘Watching the president’s Christmas message produces this necropolar, white-mass sensation. Seeing the video broadcast of the Christmas service in the cathedral itself, with these pathetic screens and the young worshippers slumped around them here and there, you tell yourself that God and religion deserved better. Deserved to die, yes, but not this. However, watching the presidential figure and his sonorous inanity, you tell yourself that here at least you got what you deserved. Chirac is useless – that goes without saying – but so are we all ... Uselessness of this kind has no it exists immediately, reciprocally; like a shared secret, you savour it implicitly – with its warm bitterness – particularly in these cold snaps, as the very essence of the social bond. Sanctioned by that other interactive uselessness – the uselessness of the screen.’

World-renowned for his lively and often iconoclastic reading of contemporary culture and thought, Jean Baudrillard here turns his hand to topical political debates and issues. In this stimulating collection of journalistic essays Baudrillard addresses subjects ranging from those already established as his trademark (virtual reality, Disney, television) to more unusual topics such as the Western intervention in Bosnia, children’s rights, Holocaust revisionism, AIDS, the Rushdie fatwa , Formula One racing, mad cow disease, genetic cloning, and the uselessness of Chirac. These are coruscating and intriguing articles, not least because they show that Baudrillard is – pace his critics – still susceptible and alert to influences from social movements and the world beyond the hyperreal.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Sociology, France, Essays, Cultural

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Jean 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.

Reviews

[Cev · Rating 4 out of 5]

we live in a society & nothing is real lol

[Eric Phetteplace · Rating 4 out of 5]

more good short and aphoristic philosophy from the French Nihilist. We are replacing true intimacy with an overload of communication, and knowledge with an overload of information, and the map has become more salient than the territory.

[Ystradclud · Rating 3 out of 5]

>"Having subscribed to, digested and rejected the most contradictory ideologies, we now merely wear the masks and have become in our minds, perhaps unwittingly, political cross-dressers."

>"We might even suggest that the task of politicians today is to swallow the corpse of the political sphere, and we might then thank them for protecting us, like living sarcophagi, from its decay, which would otherwise invade the whole of society."

3/5 because, won't lie, most of these essays filtered me. I'll have to return to this in a decade.
t. did not start with the Greeks.

[Alice Nilsson · Rating 3 out of 5]

More Bataillean than i expected. Me likey

[Alys · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of essays, spanning a decade from 1987-1997, are quite startling to read in the present political context. Baudrillard is a highly attuned observer of emerging tendencies and again and again over the course of thus book demonstrates the power of his faculties by calling attention, decades in advance, to tendencies and phenomena that only seem to have fully crystallised in our present day, or at least which seem to strike many grappling with such questions today as historically novel and quintessentially of our time.

Occasionally this feels forced, as though working backwards to fit events to a preformulated style, his signature cynical, ironic, fatalistic manner of approaching things, and a certain standard repertoire of tropes regarding disappearance, virtuality, meaninglessness, the collapse of difference and so on, and when this occurs it is rather annoying, as he comes across as someone playacting at a certain French intellectual cliché. But when he's on point, he's on point, and the sense of dislocation that comes from discovering that what seems particular to today was already detectable decades prior is at once both powerfully dispiriting and vindicating.

[Jose · Rating 3 out of 5]

Regularcillo en cuanto a los artículos de índole política y a otros en los que Baudrillard se emperra en meter sus teorías del simulacro sin adaptarse éstas al objeto de sus comentarios. Por ejemplo, cuando dice que el mercado de valores transcurre en paralelo a su modelo real con parangón en forma de mercancias sin llegar a tener ningún efecto real, posiblemente una de las mayores falacias y aberraciones económicas jamás escritas.

Excepcional cuando Baudrillard asume la labor de Marshall McLuhan a la hora de hablar de internet. Se mimetiza con el canadiense en forma y fondo, terminando por ser igual de profético que él: es alucinante que ya en el 94, dos décadas antes de las redes sociales, especulase con la sensación de "subidón" como manera de atar al usuario de la red digital.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have added this book, because it is one of those books (as "The Transparency of Evil") that I keep within close reach. The essays in it are continuously thought provoking and insightful. Baudrillard crosses many disciplines, and does so without a flinch. And well, I cannot say that I do not have a special place in my heart for French cynicism.

[Hans Gerwitz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh. Baudrillard is smart, but these essays are entirely too long-winded. They follow a template of wry comment about contemporary (mid-1990s) society, then a metaphor (very often involving HIV), then belaboring the metaphor.

I don't regret reading it (and found myself highlighting many quotable passages), but cannot recommend it, either.

[Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

the essays become a bit redundant if you read it in a few big sittings, but otherwise it's nice to reinforce the brilliance of it all

[Mira Madsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

måske bedre hvis man kender til franske forhold 90’erne, men stadig ret relevant

[Remus Balint · Rating 3 out of 5]

never expected to see Baudrillard writing about Cicciolina

[Guláš Koperník · Rating 3 out of 5]

Četl jsem tu knihu dost dlouho, ale protože je to sbírka esejů, tak to ani nevadilo. Jak už se psalo v recenzích, bylo to pro mě trochu Mumbo Jumbo, protože McLuhana znám tak z učebnice ZSV pro střední školy, kde není. A i kdybych ho znal, nepoznám narážky citacemi z Mallarméa a tak podobně. I tak mi ale knížka dala víc než to, že se můžu chlubit tím, že jsem jí četl. Ukazuje společenskou situaci z Francie a globalizovaného světa poloviny devadesátých let, přičemž pojmenovává trendy mající vypovídající hodnotu dodnes. Ať už je to virtuální prostor, mediální obraz epidemií, nebo třeba neschopnost levice zabránit vzestupu pravicového extremismu. Taky je ta kniha ale trochu moc scifi, odtažená od reálnýho světa a jazykově až přetříbřená.

[Wim · Rating 4 out of 5]

leuk om te lezen voor de leek zoals ik want het zijn allemaal stukjes van een paar pagina's geschreven op het niveau van de krantenlezer, over thema's zoals media, extremisme maar hij heeft een brede waaier aan onderwerpen inclusief holocaustontkenning, AIDS, gekkekoeieziekte. Wederom: echt iets voor iemand die wel van een krant of krantazine kan genieten. sommige van die stukjes zijn echt wel heel actueel, copy paste het op je tumblr en vervang "oude le pen" door "donald trump" oid en je kan op 123 een viraal hitje scoren. Soms slaat hij de bal wat mis, of, mogelijk in een poging tot polemisch te zijn, kiest hij voor meningen die vandaag terecht niet meer door de beugel kunnen (bv. in het stukje over transpersonen moest ik meer dan eens slikken).

[Jason]

neorosis, among other things, may be an effective mental disposition for warding off madness.

[Bohemothe · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favourite section was the combination of cloning Dolly the sheep for the consumption of the cattle industry, further infuriating the effects of Mad Cow Disease.

[Grace McNealy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this on my phone

[hassan · Rating 3 out of 5]

it was ok. A little outdated. Would rather read his seminal works & Marshall Mclughan's works.

[Francesca · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t think I really like Baudrillard, like he’s this big name in the type of philosophy/theoretical journalism I love but each time I read him I just feel abit bleh at the end.

‘Amid all the pornography which surrounds us, we have lost the illusion of desire, so in contemporary art we have also lost the desire for illusion. In porn there is no longer any room for desire.’
/
‘Sex - into signs and images which obliterate the whole secret, the ambiguity of sex. Sex now has nothing to do with the illusion of desire but relates solely to the hyper reality of the image.’

- The Art Conspiracy
(My fave essay in this collection was released on my birthday lol)

Probably 3.5 overall but some really interesting points scattered throughout

[Romolo · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love Baudrillard but his stance (even if just rhetorically) on HIV/aids made me so physically unwell that I had to put down the book. I had to think about a documentary I saw on Habermas who, born with a cleft palate, was forced from a very young age to rethink communication as useless and hypocritical as long as we don’t force ourselves to understand the weakest speakers. It made him a true humanist. Also Levinas comes to mind with “le visage autrui”, looking the other in the eye to understand and take full responsibility for your words and actions. In this particular essay, I felt Baudrillard at his very lowest and I understand now why he is rarely quoted by living critics.

[Ytse · Rating 4 out of 5]

When a situation is rotten and contradictory, the tiniest incident reveals all its rottenness and contradictoriness. Even the rottenness and contradictoriness of the liberal system. 'Everything must circulate freely' - well, so then must germs, viruses, drugs, capital and terrorists. And this circulation of the worst of things is much quicker than the circulation of the best. There will be no end, then, to the opening and re-closing of frontiers.

[Sohan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for debate research, very persuasively written. Can’t read his literature from the perspective of a skeptic, you need to understand the themes and main ideas to what he’s saying to actually get anything out of it. I find his argument about information bomb quite interesting and his thoughts on artificial intelligence are especially relevant in todays society.

[Ekin Köseoğlu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Baudrillard’s perspective is quite intriguing, from
the very start of the book. I do need more context as to where he is coming from, and I should be better-read to understand a chunk of the text in depth. Nonetheless, insightful piece of writing. I will, hopefully, read some parts of it again at some point to better grasp what he’s saying.

[Wohn Jick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Its fine. Some essays were fairly interesting and insightful, but most tended to be masturbatory attempts from Baudrillard to insert his own fear of technology and weird metaphors into topics that they didnt mesh well with. Certainly would benefit from understanding his larger philosophical thought, but not needed.

[Bhanu Pratap · Rating 5 out of 5]

Time to learn french.

[ipsum · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sippin on that straight fuckin gas

[Gulliver's Bad Trip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like, everybody already went by now to watch the new Matrix movie made by only one of the brothers which turned sisters, didn't you? The truth is that nobody can say what they really expected from it before seeing it, no more than could its flop be explained as just a plain rejection favoring better cultural tastes which are virtually and ordinarily inexistent in cinema. Nothing new as well as Marine Le Pen keep on playing as the political game main favorite canditate until nowadays in place of her good venerable dad. So here I stand reading these essays alone while analysing and correlating what no one else even dare to. And also doing it in between movies and the reality that the first used to portray or now better distort even more. Lately, the audiovisual media is doing nothing more than showing its solidarity amongst many other encroaching, pestilent, pressing things.

[Mehreen · Rating 1 out of 5]

No matter how much I tried to like this book I just couldn’t get myself to like it. Had to read this for a term paper and it was such a cruel thing. It was so hard to understand every single sentence of this book. The information uncovered in these editorial pieces were truly amazing but in my opinion any idea can be easily explained by using simple vocabulary.

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting but not for everyone.

If you have some familiarity with McLuhan and his way of thinking Baudrillard's essay's will be very provocative. Otherwise they might be taken as confusing mumbo jumbo.

HHH

[Lorraine · Rating 2 out of 5]

the very beginning pissed me off. I found it boring.