BAUDRILLARD NOW

• Theory Fictions: Baudrillard in the Contemporary Moment

Douglas Kellner

In some of his later writings, Jean Baudrillard develops what he terms “theory fiction,” or what he also calls “simulation theory” and “anticipatory theory.” Such “theory” intends to simulate, grasp, and anticipate historical events, that he believes are continually outstripping all contemporary theory. The current situation, he claims, is more fantastic than the most fanciful science fiction, or theoretical projections of a futurist society.

• The Fragmented Era is a Dead End for Humanity

Oleg Maltsev

What is unique in Baudrillard’s philosophy compared to other exceptional ones in the world? Baudrillard is sober in his statements about what is happening now and what will happen. He is a prophet, unlike others. All other philosophers could be called “reasoners” because they only reason, but Baudrillard prognoses.

• Implosion Today

Gary Genosko

Implosion is a technological tendency of information flow supported by increases in the speed of communication and degree of a historical period’s electric and later electronic networked integration. Articulated by McLuhan in Understanding Media (1964), it describes a centripetal movement inward in opposition to an explosive or centrifugal explosion outward.

• The Violence of the Global

Jean Baudrillard (Translated by Francois Debrix)

Today’s terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization. To identify its main features, it is necessary to perform a brief genealogy of globalization, particularly of its relationship to the singular and the universal.

• Baudrillard’s “The Violence of the Global” Revisited: Comments and New Perspectives

Francois Debrix

Baudrillard’s “Violence of the Global” presents four main related themes, each of which in turn extends some of the insights provided by Baudrillard in Power Inferno’s other essays and in some of his other texts written around the same time. These four themes are: globalization versus the universalization of values; virtual global culture and indifference; globalization as a new form of violence; and the global versus new singularities and terrorism.

• Baudrillard and the Forgetting of Death as a Challenge

Ahmet Dag

Expanding on Adorno’s discourse, Baudrillard suggests that humanity, indifferent to death as to its own members, is a form of ‘dead’ humanity. He observes that contemporary culture expends enormous energy to dissociate life from death. In his view, death, now portrayed as ‘not scary,’ ‘fun,’ and ‘glamorized,’ occupies a different role in our era.

• One More Spiral in the Simulacrum: Jean Baudrillard’s Games with Reality

Elena Violaris

In this essay, I argue that an engagement with ontological levels acts as the absolute value of Baudrillard’s argument, performing an explanatory function. Despite his assertion that the contemporary condition is characterised by one-dimensionality (immanence, exposure, an absence of secrecy), Baudrillard constantly uses geometrical imagery: a vocabulary of dots, circles and bubbles.

• Baudrillard’s Spirit of Terrorism: A Generation Z Perspective

James Wolf Masson

In Baudrillardian terms, the 9/11 attacks were a kind of “hyperreal” act of violence that exposed the limitations and contradictions of the global order. They were a form of “counter-violence” that exposed the underlying violence and terror of the global system, and that they revealed the limitations and contradictions found within the West and its capitalist culture.

• The Supreme Illusion of Real Time as the Limit of All Accelerations

Nello Barile

The reflection on Real Time represents the culmination of a theoretical investigation and, moreover, the most significant testament that Jean Baudrillard has left us. Upon closer inspection, one of the fundamental trajectories followed by his philosophical discourse is the transition from the centrality of space – from the “System of Objects” to Disneyland in “Simulacra and Simulations” – to that of time.

• Conspiracy Thinking: Towards an Ambiguous Theory of Photography

Ted Hiebert

In his 1927 story “The Tissue-Culture King,” Julian Huxley wrote about a machine designed for mass telepathy, built as an experimental mind control apparatus to help control a growing population. To protect themselves from the radiating influence of the telepathic broadcast, the inventors of the machine wore aluminum hats, specifically designed to protect their minds from the voice of the apparatus, and by extension from the commands of algorithmic surveillance.