adamz24's review
3.0
Completely agree with everything said in Shiv's review, as quoted:
"Some authors have a gift of being able to explain complex matters in simple terms. Baudrillard, on the other hand, seems to have the complete opposite - explaining essentially simple (although nontheless interesting) concepts in overly complex terms. While the core message of his essays is thought provoking and engaging, the text itself is so full of jargon, unnecessarily convoluted language, and a fair amount of repetition. If you are anything like myself you will spend an hour reading, rereading, and digesting a couple of pages before reaching a point where you can explain what Baudrillard was essentially saying in a few simple sentences.
Baudrillard also has a habit of making quite extravagant claims or suggestions with no proof, or even justification or much in the way of reasoning.
All in all a difficult and unrewarding read, I feel that I would have been better off reading something written by someone else about Baudrillard's ideas."
Would add to this by saying that all this applies to much of the continental philosophy I have read, even some of the greatest (Gadamer, Sartre). Also would add that, perhaps mildly contradicting my agreement with the complaint about Baudrillard's language, Baudrillard and other (relatively speaking) great continentalists would probably have been better off as literary authors, communicating these worthy ideas through art instead of jargon-laden and obtuse 'philosophy.'
In support, I submit some stunningly gorgeous and worthy sentences from this book, all from the same page (on which there also exists unbearable obtuseness and obscuritythat Baudrillard worsens through repitition, as he constantly fucking thinks it's a good idea to):
"Los Angeles is surrounded by these imaginary stations that feed reality, the energy of the real to a city whose mystery is precisely that of no longer being anything but a network of incessant, unreal circulation--a city of incredible proportions but without space, without dimension. As much as electrical and atomic power stations, as much as cinema studios, this city, which is no longer anything but an immense scenario and perpetual pan shot, needs this old imaginary like a sympathetic nervous system made up of childhood signals and failed phantasms."
"Everywhere today one must recycle waste, and the dreams, the phantasms, the historical, fairylike, legendary imaginary of children and adults is a waste product, the first great toxic excrement of a hyperreal civilization."
"Some authors have a gift of being able to explain complex matters in simple terms. Baudrillard, on the other hand, seems to have the complete opposite - explaining essentially simple (although nontheless interesting) concepts in overly complex terms. While the core message of his essays is thought provoking and engaging, the text itself is so full of jargon, unnecessarily convoluted language, and a fair amount of repetition. If you are anything like myself you will spend an hour reading, rereading, and digesting a couple of pages before reaching a point where you can explain what Baudrillard was essentially saying in a few simple sentences.
Baudrillard also has a habit of making quite extravagant claims or suggestions with no proof, or even justification or much in the way of reasoning.
All in all a difficult and unrewarding read, I feel that I would have been better off reading something written by someone else about Baudrillard's ideas."
Would add to this by saying that all this applies to much of the continental philosophy I have read, even some of the greatest (Gadamer, Sartre). Also would add that, perhaps mildly contradicting my agreement with the complaint about Baudrillard's language, Baudrillard and other (relatively speaking) great continentalists would probably have been better off as literary authors, communicating these worthy ideas through art instead of jargon-laden and obtuse 'philosophy.'
In support, I submit some stunningly gorgeous and worthy sentences from this book, all from the same page (on which there also exists unbearable obtuseness and obscuritythat Baudrillard worsens through repitition, as he constantly fucking thinks it's a good idea to):
"Los Angeles is surrounded by these imaginary stations that feed reality, the energy of the real to a city whose mystery is precisely that of no longer being anything but a network of incessant, unreal circulation--a city of incredible proportions but without space, without dimension. As much as electrical and atomic power stations, as much as cinema studios, this city, which is no longer anything but an immense scenario and perpetual pan shot, needs this old imaginary like a sympathetic nervous system made up of childhood signals and failed phantasms."
"Everywhere today one must recycle waste, and the dreams, the phantasms, the historical, fairylike, legendary imaginary of children and adults is a waste product, the first great toxic excrement of a hyperreal civilization."
nickfourtimes's review
4.0
1) "If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly (the decline of the Empire witnesses the fraying of this map, little by little, and its fall into ruins, though some shreds are still discernible in the deserts---the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction testifying to a pride equal to the Empire and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, a bit as the double ends by being confused with the real through aging)---as the most beautiful allegory of simulation, this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory---precession of simulacra---that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself."
2) "Such would be the successive phases of the image:
it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum."
3) "This simulacrum of the inversion or the involution of poles, this clever subterfuge, which is the secret of the whole discourse of manipulation and thus, today, in every domain, the secret of any new power in the erasure of the scene of power, in the assumption of all words from which has resulted this fantastic silent majority characteristic of our time---all of this started without a doubt in the political sphere with the democratic simulacrum, which today is the substitution for the power of God with the power of the people as the source of power, and of power as emanation with power as representation. Anti-Copernican revolution: no transcendental instance either of the sun or of the luminous sources of power and knowledge---everything comes from the people and returns to them. It is with this magnificent recycling that the universal simulacrum of manipulation, from the scenario of mass suffrage to the present-day phantoms of opinion polls, begins to be put in place."
4) "When everything is taken away, nothing is left.
This is false."
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory---precession of simulacra---that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself."
2) "Such would be the successive phases of the image:
it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum."
3) "This simulacrum of the inversion or the involution of poles, this clever subterfuge, which is the secret of the whole discourse of manipulation and thus, today, in every domain, the secret of any new power in the erasure of the scene of power, in the assumption of all words from which has resulted this fantastic silent majority characteristic of our time---all of this started without a doubt in the political sphere with the democratic simulacrum, which today is the substitution for the power of God with the power of the people as the source of power, and of power as emanation with power as representation. Anti-Copernican revolution: no transcendental instance either of the sun or of the luminous sources of power and knowledge---everything comes from the people and returns to them. It is with this magnificent recycling that the universal simulacrum of manipulation, from the scenario of mass suffrage to the present-day phantoms of opinion polls, begins to be put in place."
4) "When everything is taken away, nothing is left.
This is false."
alexander0's review
3.0
Primarily the information of this book is laid out in the first two chapters. Much of the rest of it is organized as particular cases of technologies, economies, and "communication" systems that on which the book rests its arguments. However, it is difficult to see these cases as situationally organized to theorize the truth rather than being accurately empirical.
The structure of this book makes for an interesting metaphor of how material structures move when the real rests on nothing but a multifaceted, socially self-perpetuating image of real. But this work I think is extended and bounded by Galloway's _Protocol_. Baudrillard is reaching to understand the protocols which wrap his "reality".
I did not feel as though I learned much beyond the descriptions that others have had about this book. It seems to me that the primary arguments of this can be given in about 15 pages, and the rest is about restructuring media and communication studies in ways that seem relatively clear today.
The structure of this book makes for an interesting metaphor of how material structures move when the real rests on nothing but a multifaceted, socially self-perpetuating image of real. But this work I think is extended and bounded by Galloway's _Protocol_. Baudrillard is reaching to understand the protocols which wrap his "reality".
I did not feel as though I learned much beyond the descriptions that others have had about this book. It seems to me that the primary arguments of this can be given in about 15 pages, and the rest is about restructuring media and communication studies in ways that seem relatively clear today.
casparb's review
5.0
O a text that shifts, refocuses thinking of the world. One of few that I feel is able to genuinely perceive societal trajectory.
I'm not sure that I've perfectly absorbed it. What I have taken has been phenomenal. But I'm quite confident that Simulacra and Simulation will be even better on the reread it entirely merits.
Baudrillard's character comes through wonderfully in his writing too. It's not always easy, and sentences at times feel endless. I do love it for that - the text's oblique style feels deserved.
"Through I don't know what Möbius effect, representation itself has also turned in on itself, and the whole logical universe of the political is dissolved at the same time, ceding its place to a transfinite universe of simulation, where from the beginning no one is represented nor representative of anything any more, where all that is accumulated is deaccumulated at the same time, where even the axiological, directive, and salvageable phantasm of power has disappeared. A universe that is still incomprehensible, unrecognisable to us, a universe with a malefic curve that our mental coordinates, which are orthogonal and prepared for the infinite linearity of criticism and history, violently resist. Yet it is there that one must fight, if even fighting has any meaning anymore. We are simulators, we are simulacra, we are concave mirrors radiated by the social"
In a sense, I suppose it flatters the reader. I can't help but feel that Baudrillard is, in his (orthogonal) way, something approaching correct. About this world and those down the line.
I'm not sure that I've perfectly absorbed it. What I have taken has been phenomenal. But I'm quite confident that Simulacra and Simulation will be even better on the reread it entirely merits.
Baudrillard's character comes through wonderfully in his writing too. It's not always easy, and sentences at times feel endless. I do love it for that - the text's oblique style feels deserved.
"Through I don't know what Möbius effect, representation itself has also turned in on itself, and the whole logical universe of the political is dissolved at the same time, ceding its place to a transfinite universe of simulation, where from the beginning no one is represented nor representative of anything any more, where all that is accumulated is deaccumulated at the same time, where even the axiological, directive, and salvageable phantasm of power has disappeared. A universe that is still incomprehensible, unrecognisable to us, a universe with a malefic curve that our mental coordinates, which are orthogonal and prepared for the infinite linearity of criticism and history, violently resist. Yet it is there that one must fight, if even fighting has any meaning anymore. We are simulators, we are simulacra, we are concave mirrors radiated by the social"
In a sense, I suppose it flatters the reader. I can't help but feel that Baudrillard is, in his (orthogonal) way, something approaching correct. About this world and those down the line.
dariohudon's review
4.0
One of the hardest books I’ve attempted and one that I would recommend annotated to better understand.
I might also recommend a hi-lighter :)
I might also recommend a hi-lighter :)
xkbr333's review
I’m taking fucking nothing from it and I will be striking down the person who suggested this would enlighten me