Baudrillard Warned Us

@baudrillardwarned

quotes from the works of Jean Baudrillard Repurposed twitter bot from years ago. Texts scraped with regex and bad pdf2text extraction. Currently includes Seduction, Simulacra and Simulation, The Perfect Crime, and The Ecstasy of Communication.

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Baudrillard Warned Us@baudrillardwarned· Mar 2

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Baudrillard Warned Us@baudrillardwarned· Jul 14

And it is the inevitable outcome of current politics—everywhere those who live by spectacle will die by it—and that goes as much for 'citizens' as for politicians. It is the immanent justice of the media. You want power through the image? Then you will die by the image-playback.

WITH THE ELECTION OF ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER to the office of Governor
of California, we are in total farce, where politics is entirely a matter of idols and fans. This is a huge step towards the demise of the representative system. And it is the inevitable outcome of current politics- everywhere those who live by spectacle will die by it-and that goes as much for 'citizens' as for politicians. It

is the immanent justice of the media. You want power through the image? Then you will die by the image-playback. The carnival of the image is also self-cannibalization by the image.
Having said this, we should not be too quick to conclude that the election of Schwarzenegger spells the decline of American political life. Behind this farce is a far-reaching political strategy, though certainly not a deliberate one that would presuppose too high a level of intelligence), which paradoxically runs counter to our critical analyses and eternal democratic illusions. America, by electing Schwarzenegger (or by the rigged election of Bush in 2000) in this mind-boggling parody of all systems of representation, is taking its revenge, in its own way, for the symbolic contempt in which it is held. In this way it demonstrates its imaginary power; for, even more than in finance or weaponry, no other country

can rival America in this headlong dash into political farce, in this nihilistic enterprise of the liquidation of values and all-out simulation, and it will remain ahead in this particular game for many years to come: in this extreme-em-pirical and technical-form of mockery and profanation of values, this radical obscenity and total impiety on the part of what is, oth-erwise, a 'religious' people. This is the secret of its global hegemony. This is what holds everyone spellbound; this is what we enjoy even as we reject and mock the phenomenal vulgarity and a (political, televisual) universe reduced to a zero degree of culture. I say this without irony and with admiration: this is how—by radical simulation-America dominates the rest of the world, which regards it as a model; and how, at the same time, it takes its revenge on the rest of the world, which is infinitely superior to it in symbolic terms. Amer-

ica's challenge is that of a desperate simulation, of a masquerade it imposes on the rest of the world, even in its desperate simulacrum of military power. A carnivalization of power. And that challenge is one the rest of the world cannot meet: we have neither finality nor counter-finality to set against it.

Baudrillard Warned Us@baudrillardwarned· Jul 13

It is a kind of evil genius that induces people to choose someone more stupid than themselves… out of secret jubilation at watching the spectacle of stupidity and corruption afforded by those in power… in a period of turbulence, citizens will turn… to the person who doesn't ask them to think.

We are now seeing the backwash of this immense development in the form of an accelerated decomposition of the universal. And globalization is merely the theatre of this decomposition-of this farce consecutive upon history.

FARCES OF THE SCHWARZENEGGER TYPE may serve as an illustration of any sort of power-structure, even of the way politics works. We may analyse this as a caricature of democracy, as a grotesque parody of it, which, after it was unmasked, would leave us with the hope of a rational way of exercising power. But if we entertain the hypothesis that government can be sustained only by this grotesque simulation and that it is not, in any sense, the representation

of society but, rather, a kind of challenge to it, then Bush is the equivalent of Schwarzeneg-ger. More than this, the two fulfil their roles perfectly and are the right men in the right place'. Not because a country or a people could be said to have the leaders it deserves, as the saying goes, but because they are emanations of global power as it is. The current political structure of the United States corresponds literally to its domination at the world level: Bush leads the United States in the same way that the US exerts its hegemony over the rest of the planet. There is, then, no reason to devise an alternative (one might even argue that the domination of a global power reflects the absolute precedence of the human species over all the others).

including stupidity-which would take us back to the 'power figures' of primitive societies and explain why the most limited, unimaginative individuals stay in power the longest.
It would perhaps also explain the general tendency of populations to delegate their sovereignty to the most innocuous, oligocephalic of their fellow citizens. It is a kind of evil ge-
nius that induces people to choose someone more stupid than themselves, both as a precaution against a responsibility you are always wary of whenever it is foisted on you from above, and out of secret jubilation at watching the spectacle of stupidity and corruption afforded by those in power Contrary to the democratic illusions of the Enlightenment, it is only by a superhuman effort that we can resolve to choose the best people; this is why, particularly in a period of turbulence, citizens

JEAN BAUDRILLARD
will turn in their millions to the person who doesn't ask them to think. It is a kind of silent conspiracy, analogous in the political sphere to the conspiracy we find in the field of contemporary art. This is how, from a rather different angle, Bush fulfils all the roles. On the one hand, Bin Laden declares that he needs Mr Bush's stu-
pidity, hence that he wants him to be re-elected.
On the other, a majority of Americans desire the presence in the White House of someone whose stupidity and banality underwrite their own conformism. The more stupid he is, the less personally idiotic they will feel.

Baudrillard Warned Us@baudrillardwarned· Jun 14

Baudrillard Warned Us@baudrillardwarned· Oct 7

In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities