Baudrillard: Short Introduction (Mann)

[I am analyzing a five-page typo-riddled summary of a sixty-year span of work, so I am uncertain whether the vigorous disagreements I have with Baudrillard are actually with Mann, or with Baudrillard’s work itself.]

Added “sign exchange value” to Marx’s “use value” and “exchange value”
– signs of social distinctions

Vietnam War: we won through our own camera reality of victory-aimed cinema

 

My dear Baudrilliard, I do think you are entirely alone in this interpretation, at least about Vietnam, but perhaps you wrote this in the middle of the war, or were only reading the National Review?

The Gulf War didn’t take place because Americans experienced it solely through hypperreal images on tv.

“We” (this summary uses “we” instead of “Americans”) actually experienced the Gulf War as people who flew across, shipped across, and fought, and traveled, and died, and got hurt, and were okay and killed. And not “we,” but yes, “we” were also the 20,000+ Iraqis who died. Right, I get that there is a sense of the “hyperreal,” but this ain’t new my friend. For as long as there have been humans using language or drawn symbols to communicate, we have been living in the hyperreal. All stories are “hypperreal.” The advent of television did not bring those stories and that sepration of experience; instead it provided a different forum for those stories, and for different types of stories.

I appreciate later that Mann points out Baudrillard’s interpretations of misogyny, er, “love.” It always helps to have a sense of a person’s perspective on the ladies when examining their worldview. The gentleman was born in 1927 France, so his fixation on the binary of the sexes and women as “seductive, artificial, symbolic, manipulative of signs” (Mann, p 2) against the male direction and “rational” phallus enlightens us to his ignorance that perhaps he misread his own “map of reality.”

Orders of Simulcra

.. Because yes, we do trade in maps of reality. We always have. One essence of our human identity is our cognition with which we may interpret experience. We derive meaning from experience, and Baudrillard’s suggestion that this means that we live among simulcra I can stand behind, but his ethnocentric “Orders of Simulcra” is pathetically narrow at best and insidiously culturally harmful at worst. His orders also further exclude that living in a “desert of the real” is the nature of being human.