File spoon-archives/baudrillard.archive/baudrillard_1995/baudrillard.09-95, message 20


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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