Baudrillard Calls Research Articles

FENOMENA JASA TITIP BELI (JASTIP) SEBAGAI BENTUK BUDAYA KONSUMTIF MASYARAKAT PADA MASA PANDEMI COVID-19

The buying and selling service (Jastip) is a new symptom of Indonesian society. Jastip is a bridge for online shoppers who want to shop, from teenagers, and new rich people to socialite mothers. Especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, jastip has actually become a new style for consumers to shop without the need to leave the house, in addition to not being tired, to minimize the spread of Covid-19. This article will explore these symptoms as part of the consumptive culture of society, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. The results of this study indicate that the culture of shopping through courier services cannot be separated from what Jean Baudrillard calls a mode of consumption. As for the meaning, this phenomenon is also interpreted as a way to raise one's social status. By using certain products or brands, they feel that others will respect them. Keywords: Jastip, Behavior, Consumptive Culture, Society.

Aktivitas Sexting melalui Aplikasi Anonim

This study aims to look at the problems in cybersex crime, one of which is Sexting activity, namely sexual behavior on mobile phones (phone sex), which is currently happening, especially in anonymous-based applications. This study aims to describe the motives for using the Whisper application, then how the process is to form a Sexting activity message, and what social impact is felt by Whisper account users. They use the Whisper application because Whisper is an anonymous-based application that is a place or place for users to do Sexting activities. Where Whisper has a chat rating for each user and always maintains the privacy of its users. Sexting itself is the activity of sending messages in the form of text, or photos through Roomchat social media. They chat using language that leads to sex, or send sex-related pictures to provoke their sexual fantasies. So they can imagine the fantasy and do masturbation and masturbation. On the other hand, the development of digital technology has brought human fantasy to the limit, creating three-dimensional spaces as if humans stepped from the real world to the fantasy world, a virtual world that looks real. When technology satisfies human desires/lusts, giving the charm of ecstasy, then moral values ​​seem to fall out one by one. Communication through the media keeps people trapped in simulation games that have nothing to do with reality. This situation is what Jean Baudrillard calls hyperreality. Imaging makes humans seem to come out of the real world and enter a fantasy world, a virtual world that looks very real. There's a simulation process there, full of visual manipulation.

The ‘McDonaldized Consumer Society’ and tourism industry governance by local development zones in China: an empirical study

ABSTRACT Empirical data from a qualitative study of tourism industry by a local development zone in a China county is analysed in the context of the theories of McDonaldization, consumer society, and postemotional society. Tourism industry in China appears to run on the principles of ‘McDonaldized Consumer Society’, with notable differences from Western countries. We found that the central status of consumers has given way to governments at multiple levels including county and village. What Baudrillard calls the symbol system is established by local development zones in China by means of, Administrative Priority and Market Affinity mechanisms, and are implemented through the Project System and the Agent System with a process of Industry Planning, Administrative Simplification, Non-Market Translation, Selective Demarcation and Zoning Technology. The end result is an unsustainable, low quality, industrial development characterized by indifference on the part of bureaucrats and protests by villagers. We propose the implementation of non-government organizations (NGO’s) as a way to remedy some of the issues we discovered in our research.

Politik Simulacra dalam Ekstasi Media Sosial di Indonesia

Jean Baudrillard through Simulation (1983) made a thoughtful approach that predicted that reality would eventually die. The 'new world' which Baudrillard calls the 'Simulacra Galaxy', has in fact engulfed all aspects of life, including democracy. Dialectics on democracy, which provides an opportunity for every child of the nation to freely express opinions, actually leads to freedom that crosses the boundaries of the human rights of fellow citizens of the nation. Quietly, primordialism of religion, class, ethnicity, regionalism, and all exclusive social groupings has risen again, which is compounded with the liberal political process which since the reformation has been transformed into new shackles that limit national life. Regional autonomy which is increasingly liberal with the aroma of federation has strengthened the barriers of the new primordial revitalism. The predictions of the threat of "independence" and "referendum" which erupted in one or two regions when the 2019 election process tended to harden, shows how short the reasoning of some of the nation's children in this country is.

Colonizing islands

When Edward Said spoke of an ‘imaginative geography’, it was both to question the geographic positions adopted as part of colonial accounts and to posit the role of imagination itself in the construction of geographies. For Said, the ‘dramatic boundaries’ of imaginative geography are at once abstract and mobile, and yet might constitute ‘a form of radical realism’. The discourse is thus at once about perspective, position and the empirical (and imperial) imposition of that which is speculative, literary and fluid. But it is also about the unmediated engagements of radical realism and a form of geography we can only imagine. This article turns to the imaginative geography of islands and takes three islands as its departure point. The first is the island of Gilles Deleuze’s article ‘Desert islands’ (), an island ‘toward which one drifts’. The second is the island of absent subjectivity that is explored in Jean Baudrillard’s extended essay Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? (). The third island upon which this article fixates is perhaps more archipelago than island. It is the spomeniki that are dotted over the landscape of the former Yugoslavia. These monuments were largely commissioned by Josip Broz Tito and built across the 1960s and 1970s and into the early 1980s to mark the places where the battles of the National Liberation War (Second World War) had occurred and where concentration camps had once stood. These monuments sit as odd and haunting gestures. Many sculptors and architects were involved. Some spomeniki are anchored and sit heavy on the landscape, as one might expect of memorials, and others appear to launch themselves towards elsewhere. Some are small and unimposing, and others at a scale well beyond the human body. Some are well tended, and others have faded into oblivion. This article turns specifically to the spomenik at the Valley of Heroes, Tjentište, designed by the sculptor Miodrag Živović and completed in 1971. Like all the spomeniki, this monument has endured further war since its erection. This magnificent fractal concrete form marks the Battle of Sutjeska, but rather than fixate upon a singular geo-historical moment, it appears more likely to take flight. I will argue that this magnificent sculpture is perhaps engaged in what Baudrillard calls ‘the art of disappearance’.

Simulacro, violencia e intercambio simbólico en Sueños digita- les, de Edmundo Paz Soldán

Analisis de la novela Suenos digitales (2000), de Edmundo Paz Soldan, basandose en la teoria de la simulacion y el intercambio simbolico de Jean Baudrillard. La novela establece una relacion entre el simulacro y el poder en un pais latinoamericano, neoliberal y contemporaneo. El poder es invisible y se sirve del simulacro para reescribir el pasado y educar a las personas para el consumo. Se estudia si es posible que en un ambiente dominado por la simulacion, los muchos suicidas que hay en esta novela aun logren establecer lo que Baudrillard denomina como intercambio simbolico y si el suicidio desana y desestabiliza el poder, o es incorporado a la esfera de lo hiperreal

Jean Baudrillard: The Rhetoric of Symbolic Exchange

Jean Baudrillard: The Rhetoric of Symbolic Exchange

Baudrillard and the Bauhaus: The Political Economy of Design

Though better known in the Anglophone world as the guru of postmodern “hyperreality”, the French philosopher and radical sociologist Jean Baudrillard devoted a great deal of attention to theorizing design. This paper singles out the moment—inspired by a conference he attended in 1972 in New York at MoMA—where he advances the argument that contemporary design, understood as articulating and incorporating the entirety of the artificial environment, is a direct manifestation of the most significant development in political economy since the industrial revolution—what Baudrillard calls the “political economy of the sign.” According to Baudrillard the origin of this expanded sense of design is the Bauhaus. That school sought to extend the role and mission of design to all fabricated phenomena, in the process collapsing any distinction between objects (and environments), turning them all into a fusion of art and technology, aesthetics and functionality. In explicating Baudrillard's argument, this paper also traces the missing presence of design in traditional political economy, arguing that Baudrillard was one of the first authors, albeit critically, to identify the now essential role of design in postindustrial capitalism.

The Contributions of Postmodern Narratives to Master’s Degree Students’ Higher-Order Thinking Skills

Literature is a branch of fine arts performed with language, in its most general definition; it reveals people and their surrounding realities (listening, feeling, thinking, memorizing, believing, missing, worrying, rejoicing, hoping, etc.) through different aspects within aesthetic structures that start with history, culture and art.The written culture and art produced by humans since first ages of history teach individuals to understand level of civilization to which they belong and to live and interpret life they live carefully, as well as creating an environment of being open to universal culture and understandings by protecting their national values and making comparisons with them.In this context, literature education aims to train individuals who can express themselves to be able to use Turkish correctly, effectively, and beautifully; to enjoy reading and its culture; to have wide emotional, thoughtful, and imaginative worlds; to develop aesthetic tastes; to have refined tastes; to be virtuous; and to have a stable personality with humanistic and moral behaviors.The literature lesson, which has multiple functions and a rich content due to its nature, opens to students a way to use cognitive processes (higher-order skills) such as problem-solving, discovering, critical and creative thinking, questioning, discussing, synthesizing and evaluating. Post-modern narratives, which give opportunity to restructure a literary text by giving meaning from different dimensions, provide students countless treasures in this sense when compared to traditional narratives. This study will mention contributions of these narratives to literature education.As a 20th century work of art, postmodern compositions are products of a completely different world in terms of content, form, technical style, language, and pronunciation. Taking command of era, postmodernism has made in-depth changes in several scientific fields, most important being positive sciences. It has reflected onto art and literature education, as well.German physicist Max Planck's presentation of the quantum of action (Planck, 1996), Einstein's theory of relativity (Einstein, 2001), Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (Heisenberg, 1987, pp. 19-24), and Stephen Hawking's argument for absolute time that was examined on twin brothers (Hawking, 2013, p. 54) call into question Newtonian physics and are all signs of consequential new developments. These developments in natural sciences have changed perception of chronological time and have brought understanding to relativity and uncertainty of time.Recent Approaches and Theories in Field of PsychologyFreud's subconscious dimension of psychology, Jung's collective unconscious, Adler's individual psychology, and Bergson's attitudes toward intuition are based on observing human's spiritual nature from different points of view. In this regard, a variety of perspectives have been created to reveal its hidden aspects.The rapidly evolving and growing scientific discoveries of modern times have been reflected in technology. The technological revolution surrounds individuals' subjective and social lives and has created different values and perceptions. Advances in transportation, information, and communication technologies have entered into system of life. They have increased consumption and made people nervous, alone, and isolated in a world surrounded by objects.New media is a sector that has been created by these socio-economic conditions. The truth is that in relationship between man and society, media has grown prodigiously, and its power leads contact between a person and public. Hence, income that results has caused a struggle between media bosses. Jean Baudrillard calls this hyper reality (Doltac, 2003, p. 25; Lucy, 2003, p. 70).While Nietzsche was trying to question established judgments that were wellknown, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, and Baudrillard approached sciences from a postmodern aspect removed from any kind of dogma or ideology. …

Doing the Lady Gaga Dance: Postmodern Transaesthetics and the Art of Spectacle in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist

Abstract: Performances by Lady Gaga, particularly her music video “Bad Romance,” exemplify postmodern America’s preoccupation with spectacle. They expose how the gaze, as a public-driven or self-imposed zone of terror and destruction, inscribes potentialities of renewal, wherein the subject’s authenticity is reasserted through the very process of commodification, or a kind of singeing of the image. Such a notion also lies at the heart of Don DeLillo’s novel, The Body Artist. Through the lens of the grieving body artist, Lauren Hartke, DeLillo interrogates body art as a productive, yet potentially commodifying means of renewal whereby corporeal suffering is reduced to a plethora of aestheticized crossings. Examining DeLillo’s novel in combination with Gaga’s performance art, I argue that such crossings constitute what Jean Baudrillard calls, in his essay “Transaesthetics,” “a [postmodern] materialization of aesthetics where … art mime[s] its own disappearance,” but also expose the complex dystopias underpinning America’s bad romance with its own renewal.

Reality in Excess

In Hardy’s poetry, letters, notes and telegrams are most commonly linked to the experience of disappointed love. Those letters often reveal themselves under the ambivalent light of either sun or moon, and therefore convey the most painful truth in a highly ironical manner. As the means for both union and division, letters are weapons because they control their senders and recipients by weaving a web-like continuity between people, places and events. Hardy’s conviction that poetry is the most efficient conveyor of truth is also made clear in the way the letter motif participates in poetic continuity: the conjunction of lit letter and poem enables a genuine dramatization of the truth, as the vertical unfolding of the poem reproduces that of the letter. Through this unique and complex form of visual tautology – this actual irony of correspondence –, Hardy’s poetry materializes what Jean Baudrillard calls “the irony of too much reality”, indeed asserting once more the author’s belief that “the letter killeth”. Ultimately, the poet’s own voice has to suffer this ironical redoubling of the text, which consequently also concerns the relation between writer, text, and reader.

Hollywood and Gaming, Simulation and Secrecy: The Postsouthern in Knight’s Gambit

.Taylor Hagood Hollywood and Gaming, Simulation and Secrecy: The Postsouthern in Knight’s Gambit O ne of the earliest treatments of William Faulkners novella Knight’s Gambit is Jerome F. Klinkowitz’s 1969 article “The Thematic Unity of Knight’s Gambit” Klinkowitz well observes that throughout the stories collected in the volume Knight’s Gambit Gavin Stevens, about whom reviewers and other early critics were writing almost exclusively, “is a constant, but so is the community ofwhich he is a part. The real theme ofthese stories is carried by the various outsiders to that community and the commu­ nity’s reaction to them” (81). Outsiders, Klinkowitz goes on, are complicated figures in these stories: As outsiders they are by no means monolithic: here Faulkner enriches his theme by presenting not just the traditional and all too expectable Yankee intruder, but outsid­ ers from other regional, national, and international areas, and in some stories “out­ siders” from within the very heart of the community itself, figures who express by symbol or hyperbole some of that community’s most central ideas, and who allow Faulkner the scope for statements on man more characteristic of his greater work. (81-82) Homing in on the long titular story, Klinkowitz observes that it offers “the richest presentation ofthe community-outlander themes” (94). Klinkowitz has his thumb on an important vein in this novella, and although provocative work has been done on other aspects of Knight’s Gambit, especially in recent vol­ umes by Michael Wainwright and Lorie Watkins Fulton, I want to revert back to and build on Klinkowitz’s observations on “foreignness.”1 Specifically, I want to consider this topic in light of more recent theorizations of postsouthernness , and in a broader view, ofFaulkner’s Hollywood experiences and the ways film promulgates hyperreality that enables a critique ofthe distance-proximity spatial model that particularly encodes the “foreign” in the story. Written against the backdrop of World War II and Faulkner’s time in Hollywood, Knight’s Gambit works out an essential secret, the U.S. South’s ‘Despite recent attention to this novella, and the book of which it is a part, critical comment remains scarce. Some of these treatments are mentioned in text, but I would add also Hans Skeis essay that builds on Klinkowitz’s movement away from reading Stevens as the sole interesting figure in the story to focus on detection in the novella; Michael Millgate’s discussion of the stories in Knight’s Gambit as an example of the ways they were long derided; Jay Watson’s provocative observations on Gavin Stevens’s functions as a lawyer figure; John T. Irwin’s provocative exploration of the story in the context of the detective genre; and Nicole Kenley’s examination ofthe story in the larger context ofscreenwriting and the hardboiled genre. 29 30 Taylor Hagood Hollywood: The Postsouthern in Knight’s Gambit being-in-the-world. While Faulkner may not have been quite ready to make the postmodern move of seeing the South as purely an item of Benjaminian mechanical reproduction, as Scott Romine has shown it to be at present, Faulkner’s experiences with simulation seem to have brought him to an aware­ ness of the South’s constructedness and commodification, something akin to Jean Baudrillard’s concepts of simulation and hyperreality. Baudrillard argues that simulations can not only usurp but even replace the real places or things they replicate; in a reversal of what might be thought of as natural order, the simulation can “precede” the real, creating what Baudrillard calls a “preces­ sion ofsimulacra’’ Ihe ultimate effect of this precession is that simulation can become, as he writes, “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (1). This “hyperreal” exists as a plane of simulation that flattens space and time into a constructed present moment so that the era ofsimulation is inaugurated by a liquidation ofall referentials,... A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence ofmodels and for the simulated generation of differences. (2-3) Games operate within such logic of simulation, and the film industry, both...

The enigma of the brain and its place as cause, character and pretext in the imaginary of dementia

An analysis of the collective engagement with the disease known as Alzheimer’s and the dementia reputed of it reveals recourse to a socially standardized formula that attributes causal agency to the brain in the absence of clinching knowledge. I propose that what Baudrillard calls the model of molecular idealism stipulates such a neurological view of determinism in order to provide caregivers with reassurance in the face of the perplexing character of dementia and the depressing reactions to mortality that it brings to the surface.

Postmodern paradigms and brand management in the 'search' economy

The dynamics of virtual branding remain poorly understood. This paper argues that even postmodern conceptualisations of the branding paradigm fail to take into account the 'search' economy and the surge in 'Search Engine Marketing' (SEM) technologies. One of the key characteristics of this new economy is what Baudrillard calls the 'constraint of signification', allowing search engines to manipulate temporal, spatial and brand-consumer constructs in unprecedented ways. This paper proposes four key concepts to explain this new challenge to current branding paradigms: thematic spatialisation, temporal hierarchisation, consumer promiscuity and the-consumer-as-brand-creator. Finally, implications for marketers and researchers are discussed.

The financial simulacrum: The consequences of the symbolization and the computerization of the financial market

In a first step, we present the symbolic evolution of financial market that illustrates the growing “consumer-oriented” dimension of finance. We introduce then the technological evolution of finance, that derives from the growing computerization of finance. The third part of the paper shows that this double evolution in finance allows us to consider the financial market as a “hyper-market”. The financial market is then presented as a result of what Baudrillard calls a “hyper-reality”. In the last section, we show that this hyper-reality allows a plurality of theoretical interpretations of the financial reality.

Raw Sex as Limit Experience: A Foucauldian Analysis of Unsafe Anal Sex between Men

In a world of increasing economic exploitation, rationalization, individualization, and the devaluation of former human skill sets by technology with the resulting outcomes of alienation, self-estrangement, and disenchantment, the risk (limit) experience offers an escape to a sensual universe of emotional intensity and self-determination. This paper examines the possible ramifications between limit experience, resistance, and the ethics of the Self in the context of what Baudrillard calls a post-orgiastic society. Using the works of Michel Foucault, our objective is to understand so-called ‘extreme’ sexual practices as they relate to praxes of resistance and the governance of personal conduct in creating an ethics of the Self, and by examining what is often viewed as the ‘extreme sexual practice of intentional unsafe anal intercourse between men’, we wish to unpack the political and ethical implications of resistance through transgressive behaviour and thus illuminate the sequence: transgression–politics–ethics by addressing the issue of bareback sex as one of many high-risk practices (including dangerous sports).

Media, Ideology, and the Role of Literature in Pylon

Taylor Hagood Media, Ideology, and the Role of Literature in Pylon D espite the great variety of style and theme in William Faulkner’s oeuvre, his novel Pylon remains strangely unclassifiable, bizarre, mysterious, different.1 It broods in the very heart of his canon and seems as aloof, unapproachable, and recalcitrant as its author in his most introverted moods. Although undeniably an aberration, Pylon is impor­ tant in the ways in which it resembles Faulkner’s other works even as it differs from them. For while the novel neither examines the history of the United States South nor focuses on the intersections of the past and the present or even hints at the existence of Yoknapatawpha County, it nevertheless shares one important thing with Faulkner’s other mature novels: it traces and inter­ rogates the origins and appropriations of narrative. lust as Absalom, Absalom! chronicles the development of narratives and exposes the ideologies inherent in them, so Pylon focuses on the ways the actions of a group of barnstormers will be narrated and how the narratives that develop reflect and promote ide­ ology. But where Absalom, Absalom! primarily focuses on oral narrative, Pylon investigates the ways that media create and empower narratives for capitalist culture and its consumers. In so doing, Pylon raises questions not only about media but also about the role of literature itself in a world filled with media. Faulkner’s concern in the novel, and the dilemma that arises, is that of whether or not literature—which purports to be a form of expression that might ques­ tion and subvert the values of a dominant ideology—can actually escape the values of capitalistic ideology and the hegemonic forces that empower it. The functions of media and their connections to ideology have been the topic of much critical discussion.* 2 Through images, words, sounds, and other elements, media serve and promote ideologies and their value systems by natu­ ralizing them. As Bill Nichols writes, ideology “uses the fabrication of images and the processes of representation to persuade us that how things are is how they ought to be and that the place provided for us is the place we ought to have” (l).3 This creation of the sense of how things “ought to be” results from a maneuver in which media as representation usurp the material they allegedly 'I would like to thank Kevin Railey and Joseph R. Urgo for offering insightful comments and asking important questions regarding material in this essay. ’See Compaine and Gomery, Jansen, Nichols, and Thompson. ’Daniel R. Nicholson also uses this phrase “the way things ought to be” when describing the ways advertising helps create hegemony (175). 107 108 Taylor Hagood Media, Ideology, and the Role ofLiterature in Pylon represent in what Jean Baudrillard calls the “hyperreal.” In his essay, “Simula­ cra and Simulations,” Baudrillard discusses what he sees in the late 1970s as an “age of simulation,” the space of which “is no longer that of the real, nor of truth . . . [and which] begins with a liquidation of all referentials” (167). This “age” is unusual because whereas “representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as simulacrum” (170). Therefore, 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” (166). The representa­ tion thus precedes the real, or, as Baudrillard puts it, the situation is one of “precession of simulacra” (166). And media stand as the prime contributors to this hyperreality, at least in the United States: Mary Cross points out, for example, that advertising “has become our culture’s primary visual reference” (Introduction xii). The result ofhyperreality’s usurpation ofmaterial reality through media is that the ideologies that media both reflect and promote assume the status ofna­ ture. Where material (what Baudrillard would regard as the “real”) may exist as an empirical presence devoid of meaning and thus awaiting ideology to place it within a matrix of signification, the hyperreal would negate material altogether and can emerge already ensconced within an ideological framework, already endowed with meaning and significance...

Barrett Watten's Bad History : A Counter-Epic of the Gulf War

Barrett Watten’s Bad History: A Counter-Epic of the Gulf War Philip Metres (bio) Abstract This essay situates Barrett Watten’s book-length poem Bad History against the debate between Jean Baudrillard and Christopher Norris regarding the proper position of the intellectual during the Persian Gulf War. Bad History provides a provisional third way, mobilizing both the paranoiac postmodernity of Baudrillard and the hyperrationality of Norris, in a poetry that refuses to extract itself from its own subjective position, a resistance that speaks beyond the limits of its own political group. Watten’s poem is the most sophisticated attempt to grapple with the Gulf War in part because it situates itself in the cultural milieu that enabled the war itself to take place: what Paul Virilio calls “Pure War”—that state of society whereby the real war is the constant preparation for war. By invoking and countering the epic mode through a poetics of interference, a subjectivity vacillating between complicity and resistance, and formal innovations (including use of footers, newspaper-like columns, and a hefty appendix), Bad History stands out as perhaps the most important poetry to emerge out of the Persian Gulf War. —pm More than a decade has passed since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, a war that offered up an “instant history” that effaced the histories of colonialism and empire in the Middle East, thanks to saturation media coverage that covered up far more than it revealed.1 There is little doubt now that mass media sources, from CNN to the local news, acted principally as an extension of the military effort. This media saturation has led critics like Jed Rasula in The American Poetry Wax Museum to suggest that the only proper way to resist the war was to refuse to watch television (376).2 Yet Western intellectuals who opposed this war could reach no consensus about how to resist, or even about the very possibility of resistance within the centers of empire; the war seemed to evacuate the very notion of “centers,” as television coverage of Pentagon news briefings infiltrated homes throughout the world. The crisis of oppositionality appeared most visibly in the impasse between Jean Baudrillard’s postmodern analysis of the war (captured in the provocative title of his book, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place) and Christopher Norris’s Chomsky-inflected critique (no less provocative in the directness of its attack on what he terms Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals, and the Gulf War).3 Neither articulates a completely convincing reading of the war, and each, in light of the other, feels somewhat one-dimensional. To overcome the seeming impasse presented by these contrary paradigms requires an analysis flexible enough to value both the productive paranoia of Baudrillard and the hyperrationality of Chomsky. The Baudrillardian mode impels us to: 1) question not only mass media coverage, but information itself, insofar as it becomes indistinguishable from propaganda in times of war, particularly in what Baudrillard calls “the profound immorality of images”; 2) recognize the way in which war itself has become virtualized, simulacral, and based upon the logic of deterrence; 3) describe the war as a Western civilian experiences it, where the media and military use of optical technology merge to a single aim; and 4) pursue a risky rhetorical strategy that mimics the dominant narrative in order to subvert it. The Chomskyan mode, on the other hand, provides us a model that helps to: 1) deconstruct U.S. media coverage of the war by producing an historical narrative of U.S. foreign policy that emphasizes its complicity in the situation it aims to solve by war and by producing an alternative narrative of war resistance, both at the center of empire and in the Third World; 2) investigate the effects of war on the ground in Iraq (not to mention in the United States, where thousands of veterans suffer from Gulf War Syndrome); and 3) suspend the (postmodern?) illusion that just because something is not covered by the press does not mean that it’s not real. Each paradigm seems to supply the perspectives that are absent from the other, and yet something is missing from both. Neither critic manages to capture...

The Simulation of Academic Crisis; Or, Chicken Little Rules the Roost

For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient ground to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (2003) A FEW YEARS AGO, I was travelling to a conference and had a long conversation with businessman sitting next to me. I took all that he said with a very large pinch of salt (he told me, for instance, that he owned a major company that did a lot of business across North America but he was sitting in Economy Class next to a newly minted assistant professor in Humanities--and I had window seat). But underlying logic of one of his remarks was sufficiently chilling that I have never forgotten it. We were talking about many rounds of cuts to university budgets in Ontario and I was lamenting impact on students who, I suggested, were getting less than they would have just five years earlier--libraries were falling out of date as book budgets were slashed, cutbacks in staff and faculty were reducing support available to students, and increasing faculty workloads were eating into time necessary for research that keeps teaching current--while administration actually seemed to be growing at some universities. His went something like this: The government knows all that. The administration will keep cutting faculty positions and student services, but only until they reach point where any further cuts will cause university to fail. If they don't keep university running, they'll lose their jobs; so, to protect themselves, they'll start trimming fat in administration and universities will become much more efficient. That's goal. What struck me at time was Darwinian brutality of it all. In scenario, there was no concern at all about generation of students who would pay price for imagined war between two institutional bureaucracies (government versus university); only goal was to force university administrations to evolve into sleeker; trimmer beasts, and to do so with least possible supervision. No studies, no advice, no evaluation of outcome--just create a which, it is assumed, will provoke greater efficiency. In vision of government thinking, panopticon is no longer cost-effective, so instead we have a variant of television's reality series, Survivor: survival of fittest once conditions have been set to be sufficiently hostile and challenging to pose a meaningful threat, or at least appear to be so. is an attenuated feature of what Jean Baudrillard calls In Symbolic Exchange and Death (SED), he describes simulation as the third-order simulacrum [which operates] on law of value (SED 50): We pass from injunction to disjunction through code, from ultimatum to solicitation, from obligatory passivity to models constructed from outset on basis of subject's active response, and subject's involvement and ludic participation, towards a total environmental model made up of incessant spontaneous responses, joyous feedback and irradiated contacts. (SED 70-71) Crisis is an especially productive term in this universe of operational simulation, multi-stimulation and multi-response. This incessant test of successful adaptation (SED 71). It solicits our active response but not our solution; crises are averted, deflected, or deferred, but always loom just over horizon. Like excellence in Bill Readings' critique of that term's centrality to contemporary university, crisis is an empty category that activates impulsive rather than ideological or analytical response. The term crisis is everywhere in academic discourse these days, going beyond structural introduction of threat of to functioning of institution (Readings 37) towards its integral simulation. …

Ethical Value and Negative Aesthetics: Reconsidering the Baudrillard-Ballard Connection

Like today's masses, the characters in J. G. Ballard's Crash are fascinated by what Jean Baudrillard calls the accident, especially when it involves the death of a celebrity. Ballard's characters, however, reenact their accidents as sexual rituals of a marriage between technology and death that are beyond the realm of moral judgment, making Crash sci-fi, hypothetical, unrealistic. Calling Crash “the first great novel of the universe of simulation,” Jean Baudrillard has drawn heavy criticism for missing the alleged moral point, both in Crash and in the still-real world. As a fiction writer, Ballard is given a wide moral berth, but when Baudrillard's theory turns sci-fi, the question of ethical boundaries is broached, and leniency is less likely. In defense of Baudrillard, I read him, like Ballard, in the Nietzschean tradition of a purposefully amoral, negative aestheticism, which I argue is of value to ethics and radical politics in a world governed by instrumental simulacra.