/lit/ - Literature

I wish I could read it but I cant be bothered to read the linguistics background

>>17075979
Why he spent so much time on Theory of Relativity
Normal amount of time is 0

>>17075979
I just watched the movie, The Matrix.

Am I the only one who gets filtered by Baudrillard? I've tried reading his Gulf war articles TWICE and it still fucks me how the war didn't take place even though it did??? It just doesn't make sense to me. Maybe it's a translation issue...

>>17076162
The man is just stupid hard to read. I've already resigned myself to just watching YouTube videos and lectures about him

>>17076819
I don't understand how this book is hard to read. It was all pretty straight forward.

>>17076162
I've always thought he means that it wasn't actually a war in the common sense of the word. He means that it was just portrayed as a war through media when in reality it was a massacre.

>>17076930
how the war portrayal on media is any different from newspapers, telegrams and history books?

>>17076819
>>17076162
Idk why people say that Baudrillard is hard to read. He writes bad, but not so bad as not to be understood. Could it be the freudomarxist terminology he employ (psycoan, linguistics, semiology, etc)?

>>17076162
>>17076819
You guys should try his book ‘Intelligence of Evil or Lucidity Pact’, it’s his most readable. Ever since I was introduced to Baudrillard he’s been my favorite theorist. He’s undoubtedly one of the trickier ones to read, up there with Derrida and Deleuze.

>>17077027
If you don’t think he’s hard to read a lot of what he’s saying is going over your head. He definitely doesn’t write badly, his styles a very important part of what he’s conveying.

>>17077033
>Deleuze
what he was really trying to say?

>>17077041
Yes, I know, but I don't like his style, nor I like the lies he say, and the false concepts he employ.
Baudrillard is mctheory, thats why he is so famous in the USA and England. No one, in the rest of the world, takes him seriously.

>>17077049
He says a lot but most of it deals with process metaphysics, and when he wrote with Guattari they were trying to establish an alternate politics that serves as a way out of capitalism.

>>17077111
>they were trying to establish an alternate politics that serves as a way out of capitalism.
what was their solution to the shitshow?

>>17076162
I’ll make this as simple as I can,
He says the gulf war didn’t happen because he’s trying to appear smart. The same way there’s articles produced saying “Why Corn is Actually Racist” he wrote a book about “Why the Gulf War DIDNT Actually Happen.” The mental gymnastics you have to go through to argue a vegetable is cultural appropriation is approximately the same level it takes to argue a war that HAPPENED in every sense of the word– actually, didn’t

I'm reading it right now in English (not a native speaker), but do it slowly, so far it's good. His language for me is just an opportunity to fill vocabulary, although his grammar is weird. I've read Anti-Oedipus before so I feel like I'm somewhat familiar with what Baudrillard tries to tell.

>>17077143
Usually when he tells something didn't happen he implies that the entire thing is a facade, a well-prepared show. It may be true given the entire war was a sandbox to test new weapons and tech. Makes more sense given what is known about USA relations with Hussein.

>>17077143
Thats a pretty baudrillardian thing, to be honest; most of his books are outdated psychoanalytical gimnastics whose theoretical conclusions never fit with the concrete events of history

>>17077121
Constant creation. The moment we find some way to do something outside of it, capitalism as a process will break it down into a new form and convert it. He talks often about being a nomad, about constantly having to shift our territories. There’s a YouTube channel called plastic pills that gives a great reading of one of the books dedicated to that project. Very good Baudrillard content too.
>>17077143
>being filtered this hard
You clearly don’t have a familiarity with Baudrillard and didn’t even read that text. In that text he’s making a point he’d been discussing for years by that time.
>>17077179
Another thing to keep in mind is when he discusses things like war, he’s showing how war as we once knew it has (at this point in history) become impossible. He regularly makes that point with other forms, like politics, communication or sociology.
>>17077187
>psychoanalytic
Lel

>>17075979
One good idea—hyperreality—nestled in a lot of unnecessary verbiage, obscurancy, pop-culture analysis, and sexual fixations. Typical French work.

>>17077205
>yikes uhm actually you’re wrong because he was arguing for years that a war which happened didn’t happen
Ok cool. I really don’t give a shit. The man is living death and he should consider ending his life for everyone’s sake

>>17077217
Lol way to completely miss what I’m saying. No wonder you don’t like Baudrillard, you can’t even make it through a conversation. He’s been dead since 2007, dummy.

>>17077231
good, best news I’ve heard all day

>>17076162
I dont think you got a good answer on this so I'll do my best to give you one. He's saying that what people think of as the Gulf War is a simulacrum, or an image. The simulacrum is created by a curated subset of true and false information: news broadcasts, punditry, articles, statements of politicians, and so on. When people in the west talk about the Gulf War, they have the impression they are discussing a real event that really happened, but actually they are discussing an aggregation of signs that have been given to them through media. They have a mental image, called "the Gulf War," which is a construct different from whatever actually happened in reality on the ground in Kuwait. At the same time, this mental image of the Gulf War is taken to be reality by the people who have it, and it informs their real-life decisions like voting, donations, enlisting, or whatever. This creates a "hyperreality" where the simulacrum and the reality become inseparably mixed up.

>>17077205
An anglo dog defending his mctheory master/author, lmao.

>>17077263
>someone lied and then people did stuff different because they fell for it
Wow... this is what an academic grant will get you

>>17077277
Baudrillard wasn't even anglo. Where the fuck you retards come from?

>>17077292
It's not even really about lying. It's about the map-territory distinction. You could very easily write a similar article like Donald Trump Does Not Exist and address it to both his supporters and detractors because 99.9% of them have an idea of him which is based on a hopelessly entangled set of facts and fictions.

>>17077263
Does he explain how this differs from the regular mental concepts man forms of abstractions in the lack of greater knowledge? e.g. a serf's idea of what is happening during the crusades

>>17077263
Kind of but not really. The core point is that what happened was not a war but something masquerading as a war. In this text it’s specifically a non-war, a slaughter of the Iraqi’s that the media are claiming is a war. Something that isn’t a war becomes a war by way of our modern systems.
>>17077292
>>17077318
With Baudrillard it’s never about a distinction between true/false, he fundamentally claims that we never had truth, only an appearance of truth. And now, at this time, that appearance of truth is constantly called into question
>>17077298
Lol he’s just mad he got filtered.

>>17077337
From what I remember of S&S, he does presuppose a distinction between true and false because he says that the nature of a hyperreality is to integrate both into a construct where they cant be disentangled and which then generate new events with that construct as the background context. His contention was that at this point in time we are totally enmeshed in these constructs

>>17075979

It's sad how pic related isn't his most publicized book. S&S just really isn't that profound. In tSoO he is a lot more intelligible.

>>17076162
Jesus Christ is this bait? It's really not that hard. You cannot, by your "contemporary" constitution, live outside the Spectacle. Everything you see and do has already been commodified and prepped for consumption. History has been (for us) entirely replaced by Media.
The Gulf War wasn't a war because, for us, what defines a war is the show of it. And the US didn't allow that show to take place, it didn't do the Vietnam thing, in fact it cunningly used media at its onset to gain the maximum traction and then just blocked off as much on-site reporting as they could (and did a fairly good job). So we didn't have a show, no spectacle, so there was no war. Just people getting clocked off half a world away by the most powerful military on the planet.

>>17077318
>people have different perspectives on things as a result of possessing different information

>>17077383
Yes, but now dress it up in incredibly overarticulated academic language, and include a chapter featuring your weird French horniness over a book about car crash sex.

>>17077393
>car crash sex
Alright now you have my interest. Elab (short for elaborate)

>>17077404
Ironically it's where he lost my interest. He spergs out over the Ballard novel, Crash, for a whole chapter.

>>17077377
You’re pretty far off. Hyperreality is form of reality where all signifiers point only to other signifiers, where no matter how far you dig or in what direction you only end up with connotative meaning, never denotation. It’s not a construct, it’s an inability to find meaning within cultural forms, it’s finding them to be ultimately emptied.
He presupposes the opposition of real/false only in order to show the impossibility of distinction between the two. He’s making epistemological claims about the non-existence of reality.
>>17077410
>tfw you will never be covered in car-crash wounds that are actually vaginas

>>17077422
Eh, I think I'm spot on actually. I wont reiterate it.

>>17077379
not bait, you did a better job explaining the thing in one paragraph than baudrillard did in 60 pages, now I understand

>>17077467
You’re not. I looked up in the book before telling you you’re wrong.

>>17077277
>An anglo dog defending his mctheory master/author, lmao.

> Baudrillard
> Jean Baudrillard
> The most obviously French name ever
> It could not be anything else.
> But he's an Anglo

I did not expect bait of this quality when I logged on this afternoon.

>>17077298
Only anglos read Baudrillard.

>>17077478
--> >>17077479

>>17077479
Uhhhhhh then why am I French?

>>17077475
Yeah, I could tell you probably read it quite recently because you're getting too lost in the words and not really engaging with the meaning, probably out of a desire to validate your ego by "being right." Kinda boring

>>17077479
privet, comrad

>>17077498
Lmao dude why are you being a jerk? I’m trying to help you understand one of my favorite books. Fucking sophists.

>>17077479

J'encule ta mère et elle en redemande, pauvre con.

>>17077498
>you're getting too lost in the words and not really engaging with the meaning
Imagine typing that out while discussing post-structuralism

>>17077491

> École de glisse, univ de Grenoble

Ngl, I'm so jelly I wanna make a skin suit out of you and take your life over.

>>17077537
It's not a thought you can even hold without understanding the polymorphism of signs, so yeah, easily imagined.

>>17077558
Anyone who’s ever laughed at a joke understands “the polymorphism of signs” you absolute pseudo-intellectual. Lmaoing @ your life

>>17077549
Thanks anon

>>17077571
Snooze.

In the digital age, everything is simulation

CH CH CHECK EMMMMM

FUCK YO BIG ASS MAP BITCH

>>17077741
And fuck argentina.

>>17075979
>Baudrillard
>Literal marxist
>People compensated for what they produce bad
>Mutual agreement of exchange bad
>Free choice bad
No wonder no one takes him seriously.

>>17078065
>baudrillard
>marxist
lol actually read him you idiot

>free market fundamentalist spiel
yikes. amerimutt strikes again

>>17078065
>>Literal marxist
No?

>>17078065
Baudrillard superseded marxism

>>17075994
You only need it for some of the earliest essays, everything on hypermarket, hypercommodity, ballard, nihilism, all doesn't really need the linguistics.
>>17076162
His difficulty varies a lot, the essays I mention above are pretty easy.
>>17075979
It's good, I did my undergrad thesis partially on applying it to social media.
>>17077410
Crash is a pretty incredible work of science fiction, but the chapter won't make that clear if you haven't read the original work.
>>17078065
He is an unambiguous nihilist, you seriously need to read before you write posts

>>17078348
I just dont find sexual fetishization anywhere near as interesting as either Baudry or Ballard do.

>>17078092
>>17078094
>marxism is when state big, the mo...
Baudrillard analysis is marxian --maybe not marxist-- and his suposed antimarxist views can only be taken from theoretical conclusions, not by antimarxian statements. Anyway, brainrotten anglos will always read antimarxist = procapitalist, or, antimarxian = antimarxist.

>>17078286
Maybe this, though.

>>17078417
Everything is about sex, except sex

>>17077033
Thanks so much man, been waiting for someone to say something like this.

>>17078348
No wonder why you get filtered by Foucault and Deleuze.

>>17078605
I got filtered by deleuze? And Foucault?

>>17078654
When people say filtered it means you passed through the filter

>>17078681
Thanks?

>>17078490
The people who constantly complain about anglos are the current worst posters on this board

>>17077383
It's about the idea that people don't actually experience reality, rather, they experience a series of images that are constructed for them through discourse that they take to be reality. The disconnect between the person and the event can range from carefully constructed media narrative to their individual interpretation of potentially disconnected data, but either way the event and the individual are separated in such a way as to obscure the fact of separation at all. As such the individual does not experience reality but an image of a rrality that never was.
Baudrillard has some useful ideas for examining media-embedded phenomena like terrorism, but he did not write his ideas in an accessible way. As such he is often held up as being more important than he is because doing so vindicates those among us who struggled with his work during our undergrad.

>>17078348
>He is an unambiguous nihilist
>Implying there's a difference when taken to its logical conclusion.

I think it’s a pretty decent book because baudrillard in it, once you handle his (relatively tame in comparison to like Deleuze) idiosyncratic use of language, he’s one of the most realistic/down to earth and applicable of the French post-structuralist/post modernist types. It’s a shame that people take him and think he’s arguing for a literal matrix or anything nearly as extreme as Land’s fiction (he clearly knows he’s writing hyperbolic fiction)

I’ve been able to have philosophically uneducated people read it and be able to understand it since he uses so much examples. Very fun read senpai.

>>17078092
>Doesn't realize free market fundamentalism and universal non-aggression is literally the only position of ethical validity

>>17078681
Nope, and you two failed to understand what a "filter" or "filtering" is. You can't deny or skip through lingüistics.

>>17078589
No problem! Earlier Baudrillard is a lot harder than later Baudrillard. If you like LP, you’ll probably like Impossible Exchange. That and Intelligence of Evil are my two favorites.

>>17079259
So you drink unfiltered water, is that right? Fucking retard lmao

>>17079774
Wtf has to do being filtered by Deleuze with water?, imbecile.

>>17079986
It just shows you don't know what filtered means, you mouth breathing gutter ape.

>>17075979
i read this like two weeks ago.

some interesting parts but for the most part just a lot of jargon to describe simple things. he comes across as a bit of a dickhead. sometimes he's extremely contradictory, like the whole essay on animal welfare, but there was enough substance throughout to keep me interested. i'll probably go back and reread some essays/chapters in the future, and contextually it is an interesting looks at post-modernism, but i think it's very overhyped.
look at the reviews on goodreads if you want a decent laugh, there are some real faggots that worship this guy.

>>17080010
>Not knowing what lingüistics are for, then choose to skip them.
>Not knowing what "filters" contains crap or things who can't pass through the content, in this case, Deleuze.

Ok, illiterate joke of itself.

>>17080026
to add:

this thread is a shitfight but it did make me remember the chapter about ballard's crash. i feel this was when baudrillard was at his most clear, which makes sense for someone as analytical as him. also the chapter where he talks about the mall or whatever it is.
he's a good artistic and social critic, but i think he gets lost when he's trying to explain his more abstract thoughts (again, contradictions and "just trust me bro" presumptions)

the age of smartphone, social media, and 24 hour news cycle makes me think a lot about his ideas

>>17080042
he ran a circle around u honestly

>>17080085
Nope, so therefore the crap who gets filtered are you and him and everyone who don't understand lingüistics and Deleuze.

/lit/ is a feeble simulation of literary culture, yet it is fascinating

>>17077479
Danke Freund

Bump

>>17077639
bot hands wrote this.

>>17082296
don't be ridiculous
robots aren't posting on 4chan and why would they be? don't ask stupid questions

Who or what would be a good read if I wanted to get into French post-structuralism / postmodernism without all the intentional obscurantism and (pseudo)intellectual signaling?

>>17082314
IIRC Foucault just analyses history and institutions so in terms of low-bar non-obscurantist literature, he's probably your go-to man.

>>17082314
Unironically, everything from Foucault, Derrida, Barthes (easy to understand) and Deleuze.

Amerimutts are funny, you want everything easy on you.

>>17076162
He is just saying that the reality you create after reading and seeing news about the war isnt real. You're creating a reality that isn't the actual gulf war.

>>17077085
Nigger, I am french and he is basically the second coming of Foucault here

>>17077041
I will never understand why you faggots come here just to say these outrageous lies. Even Baudrillard himself doesn't believe that...

>>17082314
Read Debord

>>17076965
Yes? Tv ,a corporate tool, makes war cool and romantic, books usually have a sad story about war.

bumping

>>17076162

The late comedian Bill Hicks did a set mentioning something along the lines of this.

Basically, he said that a war requires two armies, indicating that the Gulf War was just the USA slaughtering people with little to no effective weapons or technology.

>>17075979
based

>>17084216
>Basically, he said that a war requires two armies, indicating that the Gulf War was just the USA slaughtering people with little to no effective weapons or technology.

There is that, but it is also more about the nature of war in the modern age. War itself has become impossible; what took it's place is a sophisticated form of hostage manipulation of entire populations by opposing States.
In the case of the Gulf War the integration of the media apparatus in the military enterprise at the onset meant that not only were we just killing thousands by the push of a button with no chance of suffering any real losses, but the public was also completely denied any chance of interacting with that part of the Spectacle in any meaningful way.
When covert agents of different countries off each others during peace time, it isn't a war, really. Intuitively you think this is because of the scale in which things take place, but Baudrillard's take is that it isn't. If something, even as big as a war does not make enough of a media impact, it does not exists for us. and it doesn't even exists for culture anymore.

>>17084216

> War has entered into a definitive crisis. It is too late for the (hot) WWill : this has already taken place.distilled down the-10 years into the Cold War. There will be no other. It might have been supposed that the defection of the Eastern Bloc would have opened up news paces of freedom for war by unlocking deterrence.Nothing of the sort. Since deterrence has not come to an end on the contrary. In the past it functioned as reciprocal deterrence between the two blocs on the basis of a virtual excess of the means of destruction. Today it functions all the
more effectively as self-deterrence, total self-deterrence up to and including theself-dissolution of the EasternBloc, theprofound self-deterrence of American power and of Western power in general, paralysed by its own strength and incapable of assuming it in the form of relations of force.

>>17085924

> Non-war is characterised by that degenerate form of War which includes hostage manipulation and negotiation. Hostages and blackmail are the purest products of deterrence. The hostage has taken the place of the warrior. He has become the principal actor, the simulacral protagonist, or rather, in his pure inaction, the protagoniser of non-war. The warriors bury themselves in the desert leaving only hostages to occupy the stage, including all of us as information hostages on the world media stage.

Am I the only one who actually liked his style of writing? His use of metaphors really helped illustrate very difficult ideas.

>>17085959

> We should have been suspicious about the disappearance of the declaration of war, the disappearance of the symbolic passage to the act,which already presaged the disappearance of the end of hostilities, then of the distinction between winners and losers (the winner readily becomes the hostage of the loser). Since it never began, this war is therefore interminable.

>>17085989

> We may well ask. On the available evidence (absence of images and profusion of commentary), We could suppose an immense promotional exercise like that one which once advertised a brand-name (GARAP) whose product never became known. Pure promotion which enjoyed an immense success because it belonged to pure speculation. The war is also pure and speculative, to the extent that we do not see the real event that it could be or that it would signify. It reminds us of that recent suspense advertisement : today I take off the top, tomorrow I take off the bottom; today I unleash virtual war, tomorrow I unleash real war. In the background, a third advertisement in which an avaricious and lubricious banker, says: "your money appeals to me". This sadly celebrated advertisement is reincarnated by Saddam Husseins saying to the West: "your power appeals to me" ; then to the Arabs, with the same hypocrisy : "your religious war appeals to me".

>>17075994
I read it in university. You're fine

>>17077530
Hawhaw

Why is there nothing rather than something?

>>17078065
>Using Marxist as a slur
>Free market good

back to the YouTube comment section with you, 14 year old

>>17078065
>People are compensated for their labor
>Owners of production have any actual role in what they produce


Get back to work, Bezos kun installed you with a heat sensor that detects when you’re not moving! Don’t you love being in such a free society where all of your labor is contracted :) oh wait, was that not “real capitalism”? That was crony capitalism, right? What does that line of thinking remind me of?

>>17082448
>Nigger, I am french and he is basically the second coming of Foucault here
Then you are a retard. I'm not even french and still aware that my french academic fellows don't take him seriously, since is worthless to contemporary standars

>>17082314
>Who or what would be a good read if I wanted to get into French post-structuralism / postmodernism without all the intentional obscurantism and (pseudo)intellectual signaling?
Literally nothing. Without the obscurantism and intellectual signalling post-structuralism doesn't exist.

>>17082354
rent free

>>17087458
>larping this hard on a Canadian basket-weaving forum