Postmodernism is Good Actually: Jean Baudrillard's Philosophy | Plastic Pills

FIGHT The Society of the Spectacle. . .

What is it? Or what was it? These four categories: We got news,  entertainment, advertising, propaganda.

. . but then there's social media and I  debated whether.

. . Is this a separate spectacle category?

Something  like a "micro-diffuse" spectacle? But in my opinion this is merely a difference  in degree rather than a difference in kind. The secondary reality in which  everything was a choice between 20 channels is now a choice between 2  million channels, including this one.

So we know the spectacle needs reality, and reality needs the spectacle,  the spectacle drowns out reality. Power conspires for itself to be  hidden, and there's a loss here. We've lost something.

And in spectacle theory we've lost "the social. " But we could get it back if we try  really, really hard; if we're very, very radical in our commitments and beliefs. In that previous video I  labelled it as neo-marxist.

But there is a spectre haunting the spectacle:  what if we couldn't only NOT get the social back, but what if the social never  existed in the first place? That's to say its theoretical inception was always  an after-the-fact explanation from the jump. That's gonna be Baudrillard's strategy—we'll never get back to the real "social"  because it was never really there.

It's an explanation that arrives too late,  after-the-fact, and doesn't actually explain the thing that you hope it does. So trying  to represent "reality" in theoretical systems whether that's writing books or making videos  is trying to escape a system by ADDING to it. Does that make sense?

It's like communicating in order to get outside of  communication, and that's just impossible. Maybe this is a better way to put it: spectacle  theory assumes that if we communicated about reality better, if we communicated MORE  about the real relations of production, if we wrote MORE books and made  MORE YouTube videos and then did MORE public art than the people would  wake up; they'd become conscious. No says Baudrillard, the problem is not that we  don't communicate enough, or well enough, it's that we communicate way too  much already, that medium is the message thing.

And the medium itself is anti-social. So  sending out more messages is not going to wake people up out of their ideological dream—it  merely adds to the complexity of the dream. So if you do get the feeling  (correctly) that social media feels anti-social then you might  be feeling the same thing he did, although he said it way back in the 80s that time that we look back on as a nostalgic time of neighborhood bike  rides and in-person board games.

So the way out of the spectacle is supposed  to be MORE radical production of theory, of situations, and art, and here's my response  to myself (with the benefit of hindsight) You can overproduce as frantically as you want,  you can make all the Marxist YouTube videos you want, but in in the end you're just gonna  be doing the same [ __ ] as everyone else, nothing escapes spectacularization, even  protests, and most demonstrably art: [Artist]: "In the age of uh  ancient Rome and Greece the idea of these mythical gods having magical powers having the ability to cheat death and live  into the afterlife. . .

alter the world around us having a very similar relationship  with characters like Mewtwo" Now Baudrillard had the same Mentor as  Debord: Henri Lefebvre, which is cool, though he became less and less convinced by the Marxist or neo-Marxist view of  the world, especially "history. " And if you want a word for what he's doing  around the 80s maybe maybe call it post-marxism? So the quick review is that for Debord,  there's an economic base where the real stuff in society happens, especially commodity  ownership, production, and also power.

And then there's a spectacle. The  spectacle is not truly productive it's pseudo-productive: energy-sucking choices  and fake conflicts. .

. that's spectacle: Images by which we relate to each other that  make no difference to the conditions of life. And then between the base and the  spectacle are all the people that constitute "SOCIETY," they're all in between and the spectacle is over here they're looking this way instead of this way and they are  atomized, alienated in private shells.

Why? Because they're ignorant and stupid. So to be "conscious" is to look this way to see the truth of the structure.

A truth that is—in the  last instance at least—economic relations. So this is what "good" intellectuals  are supposed to do: they wake people up, they give them consciousness, they make  them aware of what's REALLY going on. The relations of production  are still awaiting some social subjects to wake up and move history forward.

Now this is an extremely tense moment. . .

. . .

we have our little model we have all our of our people with wills they have the manpower required to change society and at long last. . .

are they  going to look the right way? What will happen? What are they gonna do?

Look around, no one's waking up. . .

Oh [ __ ] now they're all falling  into fascism oh god oh sh— Why? If "theory" is supposed to do anything it needs  to figure out why this step doesn't go as planned. Believing in the consciousness of the masses  as inevitable, or even possible, might just be another layer of Enlightenment fantasy that  humanists are trying to sneak into the model.

Of course consciousness is probably there  because it makes theorists feel like they're really important to this process,  when in fact the whole model is wrong. And why would that be? It's wrong  because it holds that society, the direction of a society, the history of a  society, is ultimately a matter of decision: if not an actual choice that  has been made then at least the potential choice that we can theorize about  making, or having been made; a virtual choice.

To be unconscious, for Debord, is at least the  kind of implied choice that the subjects of a society make. They want to continue being  unconscious. .

. because they're ignorant! They're beholden to the little pleasures  of the spectacle and so they choose to make fake choices instead of the real choices.

So if we ask Baudrillard's opinion on the matter,  if we look around a bit, you know, we have maybe ten thousand years of cultures and  not many of them were really that concerned with this fantastic event of THE CHOICE. Is that because they were all stupid  and ignorant? Or is it more accurate to say that choices more often choose them,  and they were a lot more concerned with rituals and simulacra and images than the  rather boring question of who owns what.

In fact, when it comes to that question they're  not really ignorant at all. People usually know exactly who owns what and don't care. And as often as not they end up worshipping those owners and the reason they do that a Marxist may theorize, is that they are all beholden to ideology or false consciousness and I should specify this is not all Marxists—just the representationalist ones, or  the humanist ones, like Debord, he still hopes that society's at bottom  a matter of freedom, a social contract, and cuz of that damned spectacle we  the people choose not to be free.

So Baudrillard asks instead: what if we aren't  trapped by ideology? What if they are actually and we are actually getting exactly what  we want from the TVs and the TikToks? Whether that's consuming football or  consuming educational content on YouTube.

. . what if it's the theorists who  are alienated from the masses?

Theorists who give all these explanations for our behaviour after the fact  without understanding us at all? What if deep down we really don't want  the burden of anything like "freedom"? Big if true.

So here I guess is like the the  summary overview: the spectacle theory whatever it's good for—and  it's good for a lot, it's fun but it's cooking with the wrong ingredients  insofar as "consciousness" and "freedom" are part of the explanatory recipe because Baudrillard's post-marxism isn't dumping all of Marxism, he just wants  to test out some alternative hypotheses like whatever "event of consciousness"  you're supposing could happen. . .

it's not happening. It's never happened. And it's not not happening because  everyone is stupid and watches Fox News instead of reading the Communist Manifesto and this is for sure true—consciousness is really  terrible as a supposed reactant in revolutions.

. . Now you know what's a good necessary cause?

Starvation. This goes out to anyone who has ever typed  the words "overthrow capitalism" into their phone or computer okay: Has there ever  been a revolution without starvation? Because when they're fed, the  masses don't do anything unexpected, so instead of just taking the route of calling  them stupid or saying they're all deceived, Baudrillard's not interested in  calling them subjects at all.

Let's not even call them objects Let's just group them as a giant aggregate mass-object. Now individuals might have inconsequential disagreements with each other, but the Mass as a whole exists to keep everything in politics moving in the same  direction. Definitely not to change direction and the only time the masses ever wake up to  change direction is when they're starving.

This might be controversial, I don't know, it  doesn't seem like it to me there has never in history been a revolution caused by ideas, no  matter what the highschool history textbooks say So the first step is let's just drop  "consciousness" from "the social" that doesn't explain [ __ ] about people, en masse at least. And while we're at it, why don't we just drop "the social" from "society" too? It's redundant.

"The social" as a special property is something like a magical connection that theorists  put onto people after-the-fact that sneaks in the hidden assumption that we  actually enjoy the burden of choice You heard about the social contract? Big news: no one ever signed that. .

. you know that right? it's made up.

Almost all social theory forever believes in that one central illusion that society is  composed of subjects. A better explanation is that there are no subjects in society. And I know this claim will be very offensive to some but this is not just  some whacked-out, post-modernist [ __ ] Louis Althusser said pretty much  the same thing and he's a Marxist, not a post-modernist.

Systems theory—also not  post-modernist—says more or less the same thing. So contrary to Debord and contrary to  humanist Marxism is that the spectacle, or the media of the spectacle, have  at long last revealed the truth. The vast screen of the spectacle has  finally shown what was always the case: there is no hidden meaning.

For example, spectacular politics: called the [---] because of Taylor Swift attacks on the United States playing the game live right now on television the left has been mugged by reality  and continues to be mugged by reality I am an enormous old Disney fan Little Marco, lyin' Ted, low-energy  Jeb, he's a human chainsaw You are a rude terrible person Spectacular politics shows what politics  has always been since Iono. . .

forever? Politics is that pretty much everyone has a  non-committal, low-effort agreement that some guy who sounds like he's got a plan should run things That guy might be the son of god, or ordained by god, or a successful businessman, but the Mass  just wants someone to take care of that stuff Reality doesn't matter to anyone  as long as someone's just there. Now philosophy, or political philosophy, tried  to come around and say "no politics is actually about 'freedom' or the 'general  will' or a magical 'world process of self-consciousness' oh and that stuff  has really always been the original cause" Writing the cause, after-the-fact.

Now someone like Trump's not dangerous because  he did or will do anything really worse than any other president. He's dangerous  (to the system) because he's obscene. Now the "scene" of politics is an invention  by political philosopher types.

The scene is supposed to be this proper, dignified drama  of two competent intelligent men, or women, selected to debate over the future of society. And then the respectable newspaper  columnists give their evaluations. And then finally reasonable people everywhere go and make their informed decision.

That's our "scene. " The "obscene" shows that that whole process is a big  theatrical production. It's a show.

Politics is not, and never was,  some rational, dignified process. It's better, and probably more accurate,  to think of it as which hairless ape can seduce enough of the energies of this  big blob of people that doesn't really care that much to be involved,  especially if it takes any effort. I guess the novel point here is that this isn't news "You're dishonest people" because it's always been like that,  and nothing that Aristotle or Locke or Kant wrote changed any of that.

At best they just changed the props on the stage here and there. The Spectacle is not HIDING anything actually. .

. it's making everything  transparent, putting everything out there. I'm thinking this might be a little bit hard to swallow so another example how  about relationships and love and sex.

The spectacle also shows those for  what they always were: a "scene. " "I have an idea that I think will  make us both feel much better" "okay" "and that is if we each hold one of my nips" "okay" "these nips" . .

. A stage for a game. .

. "champagne and killer just  going at it in the ring" . .

. codified language and  expressions and expectations. .

. "you know like every week yeah it's been like a new step and a new jump and just  getting stronger and stronger—" . .

. And it culminates with a hot fleshy  exchange of liquid between uh bipedal mammals. "Okay um there's something wrong with  my kitchen sink I think there's some sort of blockage do you think you  can maybe take a look at my pipes" Also relevant: this was my first uh ever video on YouTube it's not good and I don't  recommend it but it.

. . it happened.

What was SUPPOSED to be hidden about relationships  and love and all these centuries of [ __ ] about marriage as sacred, and weird gift exchanges,  and ceremonies, and then this idea of love as pure self-sacrifice that's apotheosized in  romantic poetry, and sometimes even given like the status of cosmic reality—"love" And now we're freed from believing in that. We can't believe in it anymore because we see  EVERYTHING: obscene relationships, obscene sex, on the screen of the spectacle nothing's  hidden and the "scene" becomes the "obscene. " So everything's visible on the surface.

It's  transparent. There's no more hidden depths, and the Bachelor is more correct about  love than some uh Petrarchian sonnet— Nah. .

. You know woman that he wrote about he probably never met  and he just like stalked the [ __ ] out of her? So Reality TV, on the other hand, is  obscene.

It's more real than real, and certainly more real than this. And what a relief this is, really. Like  what what egos would we need to have to think that we are meant to play in the  playground of cosmic metaphysical games: "freedom unto itself", "Love," "God," and all  the other main concerns of the philosophers.

So—love it or hate it—this is how Baudrillard wants to do theory. The spectacle  doesn't conceal what we actually, deep-down-care-about-but-we're-too-unconscious-to-recognize, you know our powerless economic status. The screen of the spectacle demonstrates—patently— what we really care about, which is just a  bunch of superficial sign exchanges because we are a Mass of hooting, howling, bored, lazy,  drama-hungry apes and we want to be seduced.

And you know I'm laying a lot at the feet of  Debord here but it's not really Debord's fault for believing maybe we could do better. The fault lies with the whole discipline of philosophy because, since the  start, it's repeated a lot of these metaphysical assumptions about history and  reality somehow being rational deep down. Even though it might not look rational on  the surface, if you become a theologian, or you become a philosopher, then you can see  the rational patterns that no one else sees the true dignity of Man But now that we have the gift of the spectacle , that "scene" too is shown for what it is: theatre.

There's no meaning deep meaning to history that we're responsible for or that we have to  go find. The Spectacle is an evil Genie that we cannot put back into the lamp. Some might see this as depressing.

. . is that depressing to you?

Others  might find it to be relieving. And don't worry there's like  still there's still games to play, they're just gonna be different games. So the spectacle as it was posited was a  "false" world that was hiding a "real" one, but the spread of this "false" world into the "real" one  had an unintended consequence: that's that it destroyed the distinction  between the false one and the real one.

So now there's neither true nor false there is just information. True and false are both messages of the same medium. [McLuhan]: "The message of TV is quite independent of the program.

The  effect of the program is incidental. " Truth is not anymore some cosmic  law, it's now a fiber optic buzz. Wait do fiber optics buzz?

I  think they probably don't [ __ ], you know what I mean My example of the spectacle is that it's this this iron suit in which you are a happy prisoner but the end of the spectacle is when this suit still flies  around but there's no person inside it anymore. [Suit-Image]: "Oh I'm not . .

. here" [Human-Image]: "Thank God this place has Wi-Fi or you would be toast right now" Think about it, why do we even need Tony Stark? The suit does all the work anyway.

People be all like—with their theories—"the algorithms are making us dumb, they're dividing  us, they're spreading misinformation! " What if we, en masse, really just want to be dumb? We really want to be a part of a group that is different from another group, and hates them;  and also to have our incorrect biases confirmed as correct; maybe that's what society is  and maybe that's all society has ever been?

Here yo, I love this quotation: [Reality TV Star]: "The people that are supporting  me in particular they're very smart people" People are not dumb, they're lazy, and smart  enough to stay lazy. Their privilege is that politicians are going to run around  and do busy work and inevitably fail, and then the masses have someone to get mad  at while they just get to sit there and chill. It's an Oedipal thing.

We need successful people to look at so that we  can you know take pleasure in their failures. So this is what he's getting at when he says it's  better to just drop our model of politics without any human beings in it and now wait I know there's  going to be a hundred objections to this you're going to say "I'm a human being, what about  me? I'm in society so this post-modern theory crap is just clearly false" but this is a line in  Marxism too I'd argue from late Marx to Althusser.

"There are no human beings in society"  should be read as a historical claim because "human being" is a really loaded term. It doesn't just mean like a body or a biological homo sapien it means a lot of theoretical  attachments that have always been also part of what it means to be human: like sapiens,  intelligent, homo liber, free, homo economicus, politicus, intelligent, free, economic, political, something's always added to "the human" and then used as an explanation for  the other term: "Society" So "society" still needs an explanation, and  there are thousands of theories about that and almost all of them put human plus something  else as the building block of society: the human + intelligence, the human  + sociability, the human + politics, but then you're already assuming in the human +  the thing that you're trying to explain: "Society" But you can't just assume that, look it's  right in the title. .

. the idea here and the idea of the society of the spectacle is  that it's human + communications media. Debord was sad that we are missing the  human because the humans are unconscious in the spectacle and they're  just alienated consumers, fine.

But the next theoretical step here is to  just say the individual doesn't really make any difference to society anyway  and never did—that's a kind of stupid cornerstone to build political theory on. Society is communication events and not even specifically uh human communication  events. It's radio and TV broadcasts, it's digital broadcast events, there's no  need for the "sociability," "politics," "intelligence" or "economic self-interest" that  we are supposed to be bringing to the table I mean like "we" don't even communicate  with each other our phones communicate to each other in our place it's our  Ironman suits that communicate and we don't even need to be inside them  anymore it's just too much work So, theoretically, why not cut out the middle man?

[McLuhan]: "The main development it in the these  electric media is the loss of private identity. Mass man means man as related  to all other men simultaneously" Again, please don't get me wrong  and take the wrong thing away from this. This is not to say that we don't exist but rather that we don't exist as individual subjectivities, carrying out the present,  and carrying out the future of society.

We act as a Mass, the Mass of mass media,  and the Mass is an object not a subject. The mass was once supposed to be the proletariat;  they were supposed to be the subject of history, but with this illusion dispelled we  can theorize clearer than before: the Mass is an object not a group  of subjects. The Mass by definition resists changing history and you know what this injunction, this goal of changing history puts a lot of  weight on your shoulders, doesn't it?

What if it weren't possible?  Wouldn't that be. .

. freer? Then we have to get to tell the  objections about "post-modernism" because another question you could  ask here is what are the stakes?

This sounds like "post-modernism" which some just  define as the philosophy that nothing matters— Baudrillard does though, think stuff matters, and the reason is that mass media produces hyper-conformism. That is the pure mass,  that Mass pulling everything into it. Debord, despite what he hopes, is not awakening the  masses—he's producing more hyper-conformism doing a performative revolution.

That is to say you're not going to solve the problem of freedom with yet another book. . .

Overproduction is a bad strategy, and over producing meaning is the strategy of metaphysicians, pretending that it's hidden out there somewhere hidden in books that we're just too dumb to read properly. No you see, . meaning is on the surface.

It is the surface.  To overproduce the burden of meaning merely perpetuates the logic of the system, and keeps  it going exactly the way that it's going. That strategy wants you to continually  look for depth where there isn't any to find anymore.

No, the fatal  strategy, the strategy of defiance, is to remain entirely on the  surface, among appearances, which he notes most cultures have done  and gotten by just fine in so doing. Basically our problem is we still believe too much  and then feel bad for not doing enough about it— don't hear that very often do you? The strategy of theory should be  a little more playful, or artful, a little less self-assured,  and maybe a little more fatal.

Now we've said a whole lot about what theory can't do or what it thinks it's doing and how  it's wrong, but what theory can do is to You could say he wants theory  to take itself less seriously, to reflect the world out there that doesn't  take itself very seriously to begin with. One of his chapters last chapter is  just called "Why Theory? " and despite Baudrillard usually being dismissed for  being obscure, or nihilistic, or trolling it's not unclear what he thinks theory is  for: dismantling these ancient Illusions.

It's just that he means that in the  opposite way that most philosophers, psychoanalysts, or Marxists like Debord, do which is usually: escape the cave, escape ideology, get back to the  real world and true consciousness, whereas his version of escaping the  illusion is to take the object's side, to take the world's side against subjects. The world and history is already in the process of  dismantling this grand illusion of the real real, so to help in the dismantling of the illusion  is not more moral or more correct because who knows what those things mean anymore, in  the end it's actually just less boring. Yeah, so kind of long, but that's it for this  one.

There's no prescriptions, no calls to action, no potential futures of restored meaning  and grand possibilities none of that [ __ ] you don't have to feel bad for anything  because none of the meaning in the universe or the direction of history is within  your agency to control or change anyway. Relief! You know I do hate when people dismiss  Baudrillard as JUST a nihilist.

. . now nihilist?

He said "I am a nihilist," but  it's not to just not believe in anything he just doesn't want  to hold Illusions sacred anymore especially because philosophers  since Socrates seem only to be happy when they are sad, and when  everyone else is also sad, see. . .

So yeah he doesn't argue this way appealing  to its correctness or logically deduced, he just says for the sake of change this  would be a more interesting conception. I'm down. What if we from here on out rated  philosophers on their interestingness, evaluation on the level of Aaesthetics rather than  a depth when that depth is ultimately illusory All right.

There we go. I hope you found this  interesting also as always thank you to this Society because you are definitely real  subjects freely allowing me the privilege of presenting ideas to the public Mass.  The public is a non-agentic blob but you are all true producers of History.

uh  thank you very much for supporting me.