Jean Baudrillard Did Not Die

version said:

I think you'd enjoy America,

“Nothing evokes the end of the world more than a man running straight ahead on a beach, swathed in the sounds of his walkman . . . Primitives, when in despair, would commit suicide by swimming out to sea until they could swim no longer. The jogger commits suicide by running up and down the beach. His eyes are wild, saliva drips from his mouth. Do not stop him.”

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You would luke. He also goes on quite a bit about white Americans being non-people, subhuman, fictions etc. one of your favourite pastimes

shiels said:

You would luke. He also goes on quite a bit about white Americans being non-people, subhuman, fictions etc. one of your favourite pastimes

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ok youve sold me on it!

“they certainly do smile at you here, though neither from courtesy, nor from an effort to charm. This smile signifies only the need to smile. It is a bit like the Cheshire Cat’s grin: it continues to float on faces long after all emotion has disappeared… It is part of the general cryogenization of emotions. It is, indeed, the smile the dead man will wear at his funeral home, as he clings to hope of making contact even in the next world. The smile of immunity, the smile of advertising: ‘This country is good. I am good. We are the best’… Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact that you have nothing to say nor your total indifference to others. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference shine out spontaneously in your smile. Give your emptiness and indifference to others, light up your face with the zero degree of joy and pleasure, smile, smile, smile… Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.”

i talk about their salesmens smiles all the time. very unnerving. wholly without warmth or sincerity. just a flash of a predators teeth.

luka said:

i own two or three of his books but of course i'll never open them. it's all far too difficult and confusing for me. i do think k-punk on this thread is on really great form though and it's one of the most enjoyable smashing of tea's testicles this forum has witnessed, and he's had them pulverished and burst many many times

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I keep coming back, though, so they've undeniably got some amazing resilience, or powers of regeneration, at any rate.

whack-a-mole balls

its like a viz cartoon where the end of every strip is you getting your testicles exploded in some gruesome and ultra-violent way
but by the start of next weeks issue they're intact again

they're getting run over by a steam-roller
caught in a printing press
shot through with a nail gun
getting a grand piano dropped on them
bitten off by a hungry piranha

For 88, like others have said parts are very prescient, on self as brand, on gender bending (problematic by todays standards no doubt), on screen culture. He is funny, and dressing up his prejudices beautifully. At points it feels so off the mark and ridiculous but that’s to be expected or maybe the reason why he can predict the future, zoning in on the cultural minutiae and using poetry to make predictions

Ballard was a big fan.

have you read Fatal Strategies Version? was it good?

I've read America, The Illusion of the End and a short thing he wrote on Bataille.

what do you think led to you staying up all night last night? when do you think you'll fall asleep?

I didn't stay up all night. I went to bed at 9.

thats good. have you had a good breakfast?

im going to have museli, yoghurt, banana, blueberries. thats a good breakfast.

I had a bowl of cereal, a couple of satsumas and four blocks of dark chocolate.

I might read another Baudrillard thing soon. I didn't realise how many I had. I've got the two mentioned above and The Ecstasy of Communication, Carnival and Cannibal, The Perfect Crime and Simulacra and Simulation.

read the matrix one. then explain it to me. it's too hard for me. i get confused.

This is a good bit from 'Vanishing Point', one of the sections in America.

"Speed creates pure objects. It is itself a pure object, since it cancels out the ground and territorial reference-points, since it runs ahead of time to annul time itself, since it moves more quickly than its own cause and obliterates that cause by outstripping it. Speed is the triumph of effect over cause, the triumph of instantaneity over time as depth, the triumph of the surface arid pure objectality over the profundity of desire. Speed creates a space of initiation, which may be lethal; its only rule is to leave no trace behind. Triumph of forgetting over memory, an uncultivated, amnesic intoxication. The superficiality and reversibility of a pure object in the pure geometry of the desert. Driving like this produces a kind of invisibility, transparency or transversality in things, simply by emptying them out. It is a sort of slow-motion suicide, death by an extenuation of forms - the delectable form of their disappearance. Speed is not a vegetal thing. It is nearer to the mineral, to refraction through a crystal, and it is already the site of a catastrophe, of a squandering of time. Perhaps, though, its fascination is simply that of the void. There is no seduction here, for seduction requires a secret. Speed is simply the rite that initiates us into emptiness: a nostalgic desire for forms to revert to immobility, concealed beneath every intensification of their mobility. Akin to the nostalgia for living forms that haunts geometry."

It's even better when you consider how his wife said he used to drive,

"He had an incredible mastery of himself ... except, ah, except in the car ... he loved to drive, he was handsome, full of women, even when I met him he loved cars, he loved speed. So when there was an imbecile [slowing him down] I saw a being next to me, like a demon, coming out of Jean's head. You cannot imagine, it was something incredible, scary. It was a total change of personality... "