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Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard Quotes

Philosopher

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Famous Jean Baudrillard Quotes

“Right in the middle of a Stevie Wonder concert, right in the middle of this musical trance, this electronic night with thousands in the stadium, a night worthy of Metropolis with the thousands of cerebro-motor slaves gyrating to the rhythm of synthesizers and all the lighter flames serving as a luminous ovation - a new ritual worthy of the catacombs - I feel a total coldness, complete indifference to this faked music, without the slightest melodic phrase, music of a pitiless technicity. Everything is both visceral and coded at the same time. A strictly regulated release, a cold ceremonial, very far in human terms from its own musical savagery, which is merely that of technology. Only the visual impact remains, the spectacle of the crowd and its phYSical idolatry, particularly as the idol is blind and directs the whole thing with his dead eyes, exiled from the world and its tumult, but absorbing it all like an animal. The same air of sacredness as with Borges. The same translucidity of the blind, who enjoy the benefits of the silence of light and therefore of blackmail by lucidity. But modern idolatry is not easily accepted; the bodies stay clenched. Technicity wins out over frenzy in the new metropolitan nights. Growing old is not the approach of a biological term. It is the ever lengthening spiral which distances you from the physical and intellectual openness of your youth. Eventually, the spiral becomes so long that all chance of return is lost. The parabola becomes eccentric, and the peak of one's life-curve gets lost in space. Simultaneously the echo of pleasures in time becomes shorter. One ceases to find pleasure in pleasure. Things live on in nostalgia, and their echo becomes that of a previous life. This is the second mirror phase, and the beginning of the third age.”

FameGhostBlindnessPop CultureAgeingElectronic MusicBorgesStevie Wonder
Book:Cool memories
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“It is a truly superb allegory, this story of the Golden Temple: the allegory of evil's revenge, of destruction as the only way out from beauty and the excess of beauty. But not just beauty. Evil can also befall intelligence. Intelligence protects us from nothing - not even from stupidity. Being intelligent is not enough, then, to prevent one from being stupid, and sometimes intelligence even lives in stupidity's shade, and vice versa. Not only does intelligence not mark the end of stupidity, there is no other way out from excess of intelligence but stupidity. In keeping with an implacable reversibility, stupidity lies in wait for it, as its shadow, as its double. Only thought, only lucidity, which stands as much opposed to intelligence as to stupidity, can escape this trial of strength. But there is no rule, no more for good than for evil: they chase each other endlessly around the Moebius strip. Given the hellish production of collective intelligence, we shall have to reckon in the future with an ever-higher rate of artificial stupidity.”

EvilIntelligenceStupidityRevengePop CultureLucidityMishima
Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
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“Even the sex to which we belong - that small portion of destiny still remaining to us, that minimum of fatality and otherness - will be changeable at will. Not to mention cosmetic surgery as applied to green spaces, to nature in general, to genes, to events, to history (e.g. the French Revolution revised and corrected - given a facelift under the banner of human rights). Everything has to become postsynchable according to criteria of optimal convenience and compatibility. This inhuman formalization of face, speech, sex, body, will and public opinion is a tendency everywhere in evidence. Every last glimmer of fate and negativity has to be expunged in favour of something resembling the smile of a corpse in a funeral home, in favour of a general redemption of signs.”

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Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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“The cinema today: end or impossibility of ending? Most current films, through the bloody drift of their content, the weakness of their plots and their technological trumpery – useless high-tech – reveal an extraordinary contempt on the part of film-makers for the tools of their own trade, for their own profession: a supreme contempt for the image itself, which is prostituted to any special effect whatsoever; and, consequently, contempt for the viewer, who is called upon to figure as impotent voyeur of this prostitution of images, of this promiscuity of all forms beneath the alibi of violence. There is in fact no real violence in this, nothing of a theatre of cruelty, but merely a second-level irony, the knowing wink of quotation, which no longer has anything to do with cinematic culture, but derives from the resentment that culture feels towards itself, that culture which precisely cannot manage to come to an end and is becoming infinitely debased - a debasement being raised to the power of an aesthetic and spiritual commodity, bitter and obsolescent, which we consume as a 'work of art' with the same complicity with which we savour the debasement of the political class. The sabotaging of the image by the image professionals is akin to the sabotaging of the political by the politicians themselves.”

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Book:Fragments
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“Truth be told, the reality show itself quickly degenerated into a televisual soap opera that was not that different than old variety shows made for large audiences. And its audience was amplified at the usual rate of competing media, which leads to the self- propagation of the show via a prophetic method: self-fulfilling prophecy. In the end, the ratings for the show play part of the spiral and return cycle of the advertising flame. But all of this is of little interest. It is only the original idea which has any value: submitting a group to a sensory deprivation experiment ( Which in other times was a form of calculated torture. But are we not in the middle of exploring all the historical forms of torture, served in homeopathic doses, under the guise of mass culture or avant-garde art? This is precisely one of the principle themes of contemporary art.), in order to record the behavior of human molecules within a vacuum - and no doubt with the design of watching them tear each other apart in the artificial promiscuity. We have not yet reached this point, but this existential micro-situation functions as a universal metaphor for the modern being, holed up in his personal loft, which is no longer his physical or mental universe. It is his digital and tactile universe, of Turing’s “spectral body”, of the digital man, captured within the labyrinth of the networks, of man turned into his own (white) mouse.”

InternetExperimentsPop CulturePop Culture ReferencesReality ShowGuinea PigTest SubjectArt And TortureCobaiaDigital Networks
Book:Telemorphosis
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“All these forms are viral - fascinating, indiscriminate - and their virulence is reinforced by their images, for the modern media have a viral force of their own, and their virulence is contagious. Ours is a culture in which bodies and minds are irradiated by signals and images; little wonder, then, that for all its marvels this culture also produces the most murderous viruses. The nuclearization of our bodies began with Hiroshima, but it continues endemically, incessantly, in the shape of our irradiation by media, signs, programs, networks.”

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Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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“Of the veil or unveiling, which is the most alienating, the most humiliating, the most insulting? The immense hypocrisy of all those who denounce the veil, but are quite at ease with universal pornography. In any event, the question goes far beyond the veil and the female condition. At issue is a culture of obscenity that cannot but tear away all veils - according to the imperative of transparency. At issue is the profound jealousy of a ragged culture at all the ceremonial cultures - those cultures whose signs enwrap them, whereas our culture is laid bare by its signs themselves. This is merely the beginning of a general de-signification, in which all distinctive marks will become anathema, suspect of masking or even, quite simply, signifying something, and hence potentially terroristic. At the end of the process all that will be left will be lightweight, inoffensive signs - advertising signs or marks of the disembodied fanaticism of fashion. That, no doubt, is where the story of the veil will end.”

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Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“Once the great and the good had the privilege of granting pardon. Today, they want to be pardoned in their turn. They take the view that, on the basis of human rights, they are entitled to the universal compassion that had until now been the prerogative of the poor and of victims (in fact we cannot pardon them enough and they deserve all our compassion, not for reasons of rights or morality, but quite simply because there is nothing worse than being in power). However this may be, they believe they must now stand before the moral tribunal of public opinion and even declare their corruption before it (more or less spontaneously!). They would even accuse themselves of crimes they did not commit in order to gain an artificial immunity as a by-product. But the cunning of the dominated is even subtler. If consists not in pardoning them (you do not pardon those in power), nor in inflicting any real punishment on them, but in passing over their little acts of embezzlement and this faked-up spectacle with a certain indifference. And this should leave the politicians very crestfallen, as it is the clear sign of their insignificance for everyone. Some of them have demanded to be judged and found guilty (though they are innocent, of course!). But the 'ordeal' the judges have put the politicians and the big industrialists through has in the end only restored legitimacy, recognition and an audience to people who had lost them. Hence the strange confusion that prevails in the political sphere. For there is in the fact of this universal compassion a deep disturbance of symbolic regulation. Everywhere today we see the tormentors (pretending to) take the victim's side, showing them compassion and compensating them (as in Charles Najman's film La memoire est-elle soluble dans l'eau ... ?). This may perhaps resolve things on the moral plane, but it aggravates them at the symbolic level.”

CorruptionCompensationPop CultureBrainwashingCrimes Against HumanityTormentingControversiesPolemics Monger
Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
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“But surely, say these good apostles, you aren't going to discredit reality in the eyes of those who already find it difficult enough to get by, and who surely have a right to reality and the fact that they exist? The same objection for the Third World: surely you aren't going to discredit affluence in the eyes of those dying of starvation? Or: surely you aren't going to run down the class struggle in the eyes of those who haven't even had their bourgeois revolution? Or again: you aren't going to discredit feminist and egalitarian demands in the eyes of all those who haven't even heard of women's rights, etc.? You may not like reality, but don't put others off it! It's a question of democratic morality: you must not demoralize the masses. You must never demoralize anyone. Underlying these charitable intentions is a profound contempt. First, in the fact of instating reality as a kind of life insurance or a burial plot held in perpetuity, as a kind of human right or consumer good. But, above all, in crediting people with placing their hope only in the visible proofs of their existence: by imputing this plaster-saint realism to them, one takes them for naive and feeble-minded. In their defence, it has to be said that the propagandists of reality vent that contempt on themselves first of all, reducing their own lives to an accumulation of facts and evidence, causes and effects. Well-ordered resentment always begins at home.”

Pop CultureMillenial LeaderBelief In RealityMillenials Protests
Book:The Perfect Crime
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“The revolutionary idea of contemporary art was that any object, any detail or fragment of the material world, could exert the same strange attraction and pose the same insoluble questions as were reserved in the past for a few rare aristocratic forms known as works of art. That is where true democracy lay: not in the accession of everyone to aesthetic enjoyment, but in the transaesthetic advent of a world in which every object would, without distinction, have its fifteen minutes of fame (particularly objects without distinction). All objects are equivalent, everything is a work of genius. With, as a corollary, the transformation of art and of the work itself into an object, without illusion or transcendence, a purely conceptual acting-out, generative of deconstructed objects which deconstruct us in their turn. No longer any face, any gaze, any human countenance or body in all this - organs without bodies, flows, molecules, the fractal. The relation to the 'artwork' is of the order of contamination, of contagion: you hook up to it, absorb or immerse yourself in it, exactly as in flows and networks. Metonymic sequence, chain reaction. No longer any real object in all this: in the ready-made it is no longer the object that's there, but the idea of the object, and we no longer find pleasure here in art, but in the idea of art. We are wholly in ideology. And, ultimately, the twofold curse of modem and contemporary art is summed up in the 'ready-made': the curse of an immersion in the real and banality, and that of a conceptual absorption in the idea of art.”

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Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
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“This is why, where art is concerned, the most interesting thing would be to infiltrate the spongiform encephalon of the modern spectator, For this is where the mystery lies today: in the brain of the receiver, at the nerve centre of this servility before 'works of art'. What is the secret of it? In the complicity between the mortification 'creative artists' inflict on objects and themselves, and the mortification consumers inflict on themselves and their mental faculties. Tolerance for the worst of things has clearly increased considerably as a function of this general state of complicity. Interface and performance - these are the two current leitmotifs. In performance, all the forms of expression merge - the plastic arts, photography, video, installation, the interactive screen. This vertical and horizontal, aesthetic and commercial diversification is henceforth part of the work, the original core of which cannot be located. A (non-) event like The Matrix illustrates this perfectly: this is the very archetype of the global installation, of the total global fact: not just the film, which is, in a way, the alibi, but the spin-offs, the simultaneous projection at all points of the globe and the millions of spectators themselves who are inextricably part of it. We are all, from a global, interactive point of view, the actors in this total global fact.”

Pop CultureBrainwashingHypnosisInfinite JestThe MatrixTotal SimulationSimulacrunsMovie FranchisesPretending Excitation
Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
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“This is merely one of the sides of the conspiracy. The other side is that of the spectator who, for want of understanding anything whatever most of the time, consumes his own culture at one remove. He literally consumes the fact that he understands nothing and that there is no necessity in all this except the imperative of culture, of being a part of the integrated circuit of culture. But culture is itself merely an epiphenomenon of global circulation. The idea of art has become rarefied and minimal, leading ultimately to conceptual art, where it ends in the non-exhibition of non-works in non-galleries - the apotheosis of art as non-event. As a corollary, the consumer circulates in all this in order to experience his non- enjoyment of the works.”

ArtConspiracyPop CultureSimulationNonevent
Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
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