That dude used to really piss me off.... Back when i was in school and smart enough to understand simulacra and simulation and getting mad at french philosophers was still something I did...
... and the thing is … on occasion, he still makes me mad...
It doesn't come up a whole lot... but occasionally i will see something and my knee jerk reaction is to blame Jean Baudrillard. It’s weird, i'll admit, but it happens.. and when I try to explain it I generally get some weird looks… I try and just say that… basically, Baudrillard is the guy whose ideas they based the Matrix on…
But I am really thinking that Baudrillard is having a big laugh… because his ideas being inspiration for anyone would be the exact punch line to his big joke…
Baudrillard was your basic shit disturber. He built on everything McLuhan said (you know, that guy from the heritage /canada commercials). And whatever positive, stoic, utilitarian, ‘best foot forward’ Canadian way McLuhan saw things... Baudrillard imprinted his smoky, Les Miserables, gauloise smoking stank on it...
McLuhan saw all technology and communication evolving as a way to extend the human body, which allows increased interaction with original meaning, all with the aim of more fully understanding the world around us. Baudrillard, on the other hand, says that everything we have created ... from cave drawings to the iphone all removes us one more step from original meaning....
... And Baudrillard gets much sunnier after that saying that, basically, there's really no point in even trying to understand the world you live in... that everything is a copy of a copy of a copy, and all that xeroxing has really left nothing thats legible... and the only reason why we aren't outraged by the whole thing is because all the copying left us dumb enough not to be bothered much.... We don't really feel or think anymore, because we never really had any idea what feeling or thinking felt like... seeing as how we were learning from these really smudgy illegible copies.... He really was a real drag...
And he admitted to not really believing this dystopian a view could ever grow into a wasteland that could have inspired the Matrix… but he was just stretching out a possibility…. A possibility that also servied to torture me for eight months in my last year at university, in 501A –Theories in Spectatorship Thesis… (that’s eight months, 24 books and one-fifty page paper worth 100%)… I spent that eight months wanting to walk up to Baudrillard and pinch him... ask him if he felt that... bitch…
... It all sort of went away about four months after graduation. Several cottage parties later and week into my first "real" job i realized no one actually cared what Baudrillard said and that he was be nowhere to be found in my day-to-day life... even after i had spent so many of those thesis pages trying to dissprove him...
That is… except for when some trivial pursuit-esque fact or story reminds me that Baudrillard may actually know what he was talking about...
Like tonight, I read that Kurt Sutter (who wrote for the Shield and created my fave new tv series Sons of Anarchy) just wrote a script for a film which – if its made - will be called The Unforgettable... and this movie, if you are to believe the imdb.com boards (and one ALWAYS should, those movie nerds know everything) is based on a PSP game which cites as its influences movies like Se7en and Silence of the Lambs... and that can go back further and further....
And all of a sudden I feel myself hating Baudrillard…
Obviously, it would be way more cheerful if one were to ultimately live in McLuhan’s World…. It makes the world a much brighter place - a hybrid car, terry fox run, lifesaving surgery kind of world… If Baudrillard reigns you may as well tune in, turn on,,, turn off… nothings gonna get any better, better just ignore it as it gets worse… or get mad about it.
In life, it is these small moments that make me wonder whether ultimately I am a Baudrillard or a McLuhan… seems stupid, but everyone makes those decisions qbout which path they are taking, over and over, every day… even if they don’t think so.
Put it this way... are you going to see The Unforgettable?
See if people would just take the time to listen to me it would all make sense… but really, only to me and I think, in the long run, it would be easier if just stop using the word Baudrillard in public...
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