In the final lecture on the self under siege, we will discuss the work of Jean Baudrillard, a French social theorist.
Baudrillard is perhaps the most important theorist that can be characterized as postmodern.
I have spent a lot of time, in fact, in a previous lecture series discussing the postmodern.
I'm going to give a very brief characterization of it and then discuss Baudrillard's relationship to it.
The self under siege in modernity has always presumed that there was a self to be under siege.
But in the view of Baudrillard, society has reached a point at which it has literally been overcome by its technology, and the new and important issues aren't about things like the non-believer or the non-offender, but about the non-person.
In the world of Baudrillard, social relations have disappeared between humans because humans have begun to disappear.
In fact, Baudrillard thinks that reality itself is in the process of disappearing, the real.
What Baudrillard is doing is basically to trace the symptoms and tendencies of the trajectory of the postmodern
If we were really in a postmodern society, we wouldn't still be discussing things like the self under siege or the real
They would simply have disappeared, that we would be, in a way, transparently communicating one with another, as in an earlier example, when I talked about the stock market crashing due to the computer rationality.
Well, if we had really reached the postmodern in its fullest sense, the way Baudrillard uses it, it would be the computers unplugging us and not the reverse.
The postmodern is a blurring of the lines between human beings and machines, a blurring of the line between reality and image.
It is a world, if you will, a grouping of the world, in which reality is simply that which can be simulated xeroxed, copied.
So, whether you're talking about a human body where you can make a holograph of it, or you're talking about the Bible, which you can Xerox, or whether you're talking about the sexual act which can be simulated either through repetitive pornographic films or, in a very near future, it will be able to be simulated with virtual reality, where you'll wear a full body suit and make love to your ego ideal, thus making it pointless to search out all the Freudian implications.
You can just pick your ego ideal, punch it into the laser beam program, slip into the virtual reality suit, thus rendering that relation, even that intimate relation, sexual relation technological simulatable, reproducible to infinity.
Now, all this sounds wild, crazy, and I don't want it to sound wild and crazy.
I want it to sound the way that I think that it really should sound.
And that's as though we could place ourselves in that era, right before the atomic energy and television, before we knew all the myriad changes that they would make in the way that we were and the way we interact, and so on.
Well, we're in a period now where I've already mentioned and these are the phenomenon that Baudrillard examines with the most care incredible information overloads with information, moving at incredible speed.
And even to the youngest children.
I talked about how children used to learn morality from their parents, and now I think that Super Mario Brothers
They spend much more time with Super Mario Brothers and are much more emotionally involved with Nintendo than they are with their aunts, their uncles, their mothers and their fathers.
I asked one of my children, why are you yelling at a machine when he began to bang his Nintendo?
And he looked at me as though I were a being from another world.
And because of that, there is a postmodern trajectory.
I am from another world.
I'm still, as it were, caught in the modern.
He's not.
Why not be emotional with a machine?
His peers are machine-like.
What he sees on the Nintendo screen is his thrill of the day.
Now, simulation in this society didn't just come from nowhere.
The society of simulations and of spectacles.
Baudrillard actually builds his work on a foundation again, that comes out of the Marxist tradition.
Gay Debord wrote a book in the 60s called The Society of the Spectacle.
And what it was about was about how, when capitalism reached a certain level of accumulation, commodities began to detach themselves and become images.
And citizens who formerly had played roles as political actors began to detach themselves from their own lives and become spectators.
For example, you could.
You could say well, instead of like going to a family reunion, now we'll just rent, you know, a steve martin father of the bride movie, it's just as good, and so on.
And and you meet the same kooky characters that you actually know.
Their behavior is all simulatable another, another similar, and this is going to sound cynical, but i don't want it to.
I mean, Baudrillard has visited our country and when he went to Disneyland and Epcot Center and these various parks, he said well, this is much better than Europe.
The food's better than Europe.
It's a short walk between France and Germany land.
You don't have to deal with all those nasty waiters.
Everyone's so polite.
The simulation... has outrun the so-called reality.
That concept in Baudrillard he calls the hyperreal.
Hyperreality is more real than real.
This is actually sounds.
If some of this sounds like advertising slogans Good, because in Baudrillard the heritage of philosophy and social theory has passed over into advertising and television.
So if it sounds superficial good, because the world that he looks at has become superficial and banal.
If it sounds hokey like a salesman's pitch, good.
The world he describes is the world of Jurassic Park, not of Dante.
So that is all evidence on the side of Baudrillard, if you follow the argument deep enough and with enough clarity.
Okay, let me explain the hyperreality.
This is an important concept in Baudrillard.
We've already said reality is simply that which can be simulated.
Can't be simulated, not real.
But more real than real is a reality and I guess I could give you again.
I hate to use these movie examples if you haven't seen the movies, but in A Clockwork Orange there's a great line that anticipates the postmodern, when the character played by Malcolm McDowell says it's funny how blood isn't really blood until you viddy it on the screen, until you see it on a movie screen.
In real life, it looks kind of brown and mucky on the screen that looks more real than real blood.
When I talked about how my students had no dreams, I mean, what is there left to dream?
When I was a kid, I dreamed about dinosaurs.
I had a little Walt Disney dinosaur book.
Why would I need to dream about dinosaurs now?
Steven Spielberg has made them.
He's filmed them.
They're more real than real dinosaurs.
They're hyper-real.
You would be disappointed if you saw a real Tyrannosaurus rex after the movie.
You would be disappointed.
It wouldn't be as noisy, as scary, or as frightening.
Same is true of Jaws.
You know, I've actually caught some rather large sharks.
I mean, I like to fish, you know, pier fish, so I've caught a few sharks, some fairly good size.
But those real experiences are so boring compared to Jaws.
I mean, Jaws is a hyper-real experience.
Now the only way.
I mean there's no systematic way to discuss Baudrillard, because these things are not systematic.
These are the shifting, contingent ways in which cultures change and the people who draw their meanings from them change as the cultures change.
Well, one of the sensations this produces is not the sensations of existentialism, like dread, despair and those, but it produces new sensations.
Ecstasy is one of them.
I mean you go to see Jurassic Park or an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie for the ecstasy of communication.
By that I mean for the pure neural thrill.
Wow, a T-Rex.
Oh, a raptor.
And it just runs through you.
Raptor's T-Rex.
And there's this visceral ecstatic feel.
But don't think that it's the ecstasy of the sublime that Schiller talked about, when one sees either a beautiful landscape, or of the other feeling of the sublime that one might associate with standing before the Pieta or the David or something like that.
It's not that kind of ecstasy. it's more visceral it's more direct it's more like the ecstasy that your children feel when they beat you know the worst monster at the highest level of the link to you know one of those new video games and they beat the big monster and there's just a visceral neural thrill of ecstasy and i think that that The way people deal with this is interesting.
They deal with it as a form of complexity, a word I've used probably too many times.
It makes people caught in this cusp between an old world and an old paradigm that is dying and a new one that it cannot really yet be born, and we find ourselves in that space.
The war zone, in other words, may not be in defending the self, may not be any one of the classical ones like the working class versus the ruling class, the slaves against the masters, blacks against whites.
No, the struggle in the future may be to maintain the real against the unreal, or the hyperreal, or the irreal.
The desire for experience and I'm trying to kind of be upbeat about the situation that we're in the desire for experience is also a desire for a kind of experience.
What I mean by that is this.
Even in the rather hopeless picture I painted of the young, there remains something like a curiosity about what experience would be like if I could have one.
And there is an absolute extremism everywhere about how far people will go to try to have a genuine experience.
The battle lines may be between anonymous forces that have been unleashed by technology that grew out of capital that will be controlled in the hands of not many people perhaps.
Perhaps not.
I mean, we don't know. and people who still would like to have some experience.
This wouldn't make them archaic old fuddy-duddies if they said, hey, look, honey, why not tonight?
Why don't we really make love the two of us, instead of getting in our virtual reality sex machines?
That may become a revolutionary move in the near future.
If some of this lecture has seemed a little weird or to go a little too far, it's because I don't want to reduce quite all of this to slogans.
On the other hand, I don't want it to not be funny, because part of the postmodern trajectory itself is a rather humorous joke on the human race, which labored for millennia to reduce working hours in order to produce leisure so we could enjoy this very leisure.
That then turns in a kind of vengeful act against us, absorbing our leisure time, which was to be our living time, into time now spent in the service of what can only be called this inhuman spectacle.
I mean, it's a very bizarre and twisted fight to which postmodernity has led us.
So I would be wary of simple answers to this.
And all we can do is wait and see what will happen.
If nothing does, in the sense of the real, Baudrillard will have a kind of confirmation.
It's my hope that he will be disconfirmed on the simple grounds that wherever we find power, even the power of the hyperreal, we find counter-power.
And where we see an image that reproduces us as inhuman.
Occasionally, we see an image that somehow has the bizarre transcendent power to make us slightly more human again.
But it's along that terrain, I think, that the battles and the struggles the self will fight with itself will be fought in the future.
We're in a time where thinking critically is more important than ever, yet the media often pushes narratives that are intended to manipulate rather than inform.
Having the right tools helps you stay grounded and see through the bias.
A tool I enjoy using is today's sponsor, Ground News, an app and website that aggregates news from all over the world in one place.
For every new story I get a quick visual breakdown of the outlets covering the story, along with their political bias, how factual the source is.
Which entity owns the source, so I can compare how different sources covered the same story.
For example, this recent story about the new finding at the Egyptian pyramids.
I can see that over 100 sources are covering this story.
On the bias distribution chart, we can see that it's mostly being covered by the right.
If I scroll down, I can see every article and compare headlines.
The right-leaning news outlets focus more on the extraordinary claim being made, while the left focuses on debunking that claim.
It's good to compare these articles because this gives me a bird's eye view at the narratives that are being pushed.
Ground news also helps me spot my own biases.
I can see if i'm getting stuck only viewing sources that favor my beliefs.
With the world being so polarized and most media aiming to manufacture ideologies, ground news has developed a blind spot page to show you articles that are disproportionately reported by the left or right.
So if you're looking for a way to be informed without being misinformed, subscribe to Ground News through my link groundnewscom, to get 40 off the Vantage plan for unlimited access to every feature.
This is the plan I use.
Ground News is doing important work, and I hope you check them out.
