Date: Mon, 25 Sep 1995 20:29:45 -0500 (CDT) From: quisp-AT-UTARLG.UTA.EDU Subject: dab->beginning(s) I have been lurking, and have read Sim/Sim and thought i'd put up a few ideas: I find the distinctions made on (3) to be of importance to my understanding of Baudrillard: "pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality in tact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the "true" and the "false", the "real" and the "imaginary." My understanding of this then is that along with the destruction of binaries, and the loss of the real comes the loss of the imaginary. If "the knowledge that truth, reference, objective cause have ceased to exist (3), then what does 'exist'? I get the sense that nothing does exist for Baudrillard (which brings up a sepreate discussion); only simulations of simulations are what we mistake (?) for the real. Further into the chapter, Baud seems to totally destroy the notion of Platonism, through his "succesive phases of the image" (6). Interesting to note that there are four (4) phases, a big slap against the duality of Plato's binaries (and his threats against mimesis and the idea of a Third Order). Here, Baudrillard develops not only a 3rd, but a 4th order. The next paragraph in the book helps exlain what I'm thinking here. Finally, I see some of Nietzsche's master/slave dichotomy wherein the master can only survive (and thrive) as long as the slave gives power to the master. Apparently, this is Baud's approach with ethnology when he writes that "in order for ethnology to live, its object must die; by dying the object takes its revenge for being "discovered" (7). To me this implies that the object moves to become the subject and/or just is Baud's way of showing that if teh object is to die, that the subject (science/ethnology) will die with it as is evidenced on (8) with: "ethnology, rather than circumscribing itself as an objective science, will today, liberated from its object, be applied to all living things and make itself invisible" Thus the "vengance of the dead" (9)...the subject becomes the object and the cycle continues since It is science (or anything else) that masters the objects, but it is the objects that invest it (death) with depth, according to an unonscious reversion, which only gives dead and circular response to a dead and circular interrogation. (9). What I read in this is that Buad believes that the master/slave cannot be destroyed since the subject which moved into the object position only continues the cycle. My question(s), finally, then is: _____What do we do? Or need we 'do' anything at this point (in our lives/society or our reading)? _____Can this "trend" be reversed, or do we just await the revolution to come from the 'slave' rather than expect it to come from the 'master'? thanks for listening, douglas brown quisp-AT-utarlg.uta.edu ------------------
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