Posted by: lettrist on: June 7, 2009
Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carcereal). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: May 24, 2009
The object does not believe in its own desire; the object does not live off the illusion of its own desire; the object has no desire. It does not believe that anything belongs to it as property, and it entertains no fantasies of reappropriation or autonomy.
- Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies
Posted by: lettrist on: May 17, 2009
The spectacle proves its arguments simply by going round in circles: by coming back to the start, by repetition, by constant reaffirmation in the only space left where anything can be publicly affirmed, and believed, precisely because that is the only thing to which everyone is witness.
- Jean Baudrillard, Comments on [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: May 10, 2009
In the beginning was the secret, and this was the rule of the game of appearance. Then there was the repressed, and this was the rule of the game of depth. Finally comes the obscene, and this was the rule of the game of a world without appearance or depth – a transparent universe.
- Jean [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: April 7, 2009
In an essay he wrote for the Nation Magazine, Philosophical Convictions, Richard Rorty said that, “Every anti-foundationalist movement within philosophy produces a spate of books by nonphilosophers denouncing ‘the treason of the intellectuals’”. Offended by what foundationalists (and anti-foundationalists) consider “undoubtedly the most degenerated, most artificial, and most eclectic phase in history,” (a quote from [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: January 8, 2009
There is one short scene that I really like in Videodrome (1981). In David Cronenberg’s alternate timeline universe there is a Catholic style inner-city “mission” called the Cathode Ray Mission. Its purpose is to help what looks like homeless people get reintegrated into normal, everyday working life. But you soon learn that the people go [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: May 14, 2007
In order to arrive at a radical reinterpretation of Baudrillard, it is not enough to unmask what is hidden behind the concept of a sign economy. It is not enough to examine the anthropology of needs and of use value. Just as Baudrillard’s project in The Mirror of Production was to unmask everything hidden behind [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: April 11, 2007
In Marx’s day there was no such thing really as a capitalist service sector. Service workers were invariably people who offered their services directly on the market, not as the employees of capitalists who profited from provision of their service. Consequently, Marx writes about the “service sector” in this sense:
“The pay of the common soldier [...]
Recent Comments