Doug Mann’s introduction to Jean Baudrillard

Doug Mann’s introduction to Jean Baudrillard relays a man with a philosophy on contemporary American society’s construction of a cultural reality with subjective tangibles and a history made malleable with philosophical semantics and media representation.

Baudrillard expanded on a Marxist categorization of objects as use vs. exchange, citing objects that have practical and prestigious value, and envisions a utopian future were gifts cease to be consumer objects and are exchanged for love (I wonder what he would have thought of Facebook, a consumer culture of virtual gifts).

The philosophy of simulacra, phases of imagery, and science fiction, was strangely analogous to neoromantic historian view of history and myth. Mircea Eliade’s (a historian concerned with myth and culture) philosophy of modern vs. “primitive” man’s connection to time and events is an odd parallel and inversion of Baudrillard’s writings on cultural shifts in the perception of reality. Both make extraordinary statements, and use a philosophical semantics to argue the validity through perceptually dependent “truths.” Eliade makes statements about archaic man’s freedom from the progression of time in a way that implies magical abilities to travel through time, and Baudrillard predicted that America would never enter the Gulf War, but they explain their claims, they describe a culturally constructed paradigm in which “actual” historical events are irrelevant. Conversely, Eliade believed modern man’s attachment to a “non-reversible” chronological history shackles us to an unchangeable reality that archaic man transcended through myth, contrasted with cultural progression to Baudrillard’s third order of simulacra, where we have created a disconnected virtual reality.

His views on seduction blatantly enforce an ignorant archaic stereotypical gender roles, and are not worthy of mention.