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Baudrillard's way of putting it does seem to kinda remove the actual real consequences of US foreign policy on, y'know, actual Iraqi people in favour of a 'clever' quip which has the illusion of profundity. (Ah, but ARE they ACTUAL Iraqi people, or are they merely a SIMULCRUM oh shut up...)
I guess you glossed over this part:
"The reality-fundamentalists equip themselves with a form of magical thinking that confuses message and messenger: if you speak of the simulacrum, then you are a simulator; if you speak of the virtuality of war, then you are in league with it and have no regard for the hundreds of thousands of dead ... it is not we, the messengers of the simulacrum, who have plunged things into this discredit, it is the system itself that has fomented this uncertainty that affects everything today."
Although Baudrillard is mostly known for his concept of the Simulacrum, it's one of many, and hardly represents his oeuvre. His notion of the Symbolic; relations and reversibility (which runs counter to the Simulacrum) is of equal importance. I find it difficult parse these two without Impossible Exchange (that which is not exchangeable for anything; thought, the world)... Seduction... and so on...
Since critics are so keen on turning his work into a moral argument, if you make the effort to understand his thought, and I suggest that you do, you'll find Baudrillard's concerned the human animal is subjecting itself to a series of experiments in which nothing human will survive.
Baudrillards thought is subtle and complex, and yes, profound. Lables such as 'postmodern' are misplaced, he's something of a gnostic. Radical anthropology, is an apt description, I think.
For those who are interested, 'Passwords' is Baudrillards retrospective introduction to his thought.
"Cipher, do not decipher. Work over the illusion. Create illusion to create an event. Make enigmatic what is clear, render unintelligable what is only too intelligible, make the event itself unreadable. Accentuate the false transparency of the world to spread a terroristic confusion about it, or the germs or viruses of a radical illusion -- in other words, a radical disillusioning of the real. Viral, pernicious thought, corrosive of meaning, generative of an erotic perception of reality's turmoil. Promote a clandestine trade in ideas, of all inadmissable ideas, of unassailable ideas, as the liquor trade had to be promoted in the 1930s. For we are already in a state of full-scale prohibition. Thought has become an extremely rare commodity, prohibited and prohibitive, which has to be cultivated in secret places following esoteric rules."
Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime |
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