THE POSSIBLE

‘Normal men don’t know that everything is possible.’ David Rousset, The Other Kingdom, 1947 Whenever I get into a deep conversation with someone, where we’re exploring what is and what isn’t in this world, as we go deeper into the subject, sooner or later we hit bedrock — the point where rational argument takes you […]

McLUHAN IN MANHATTAN

“The tactic of the terrorist model is to provoke a surplus of reality and to make the whole system collapse under it.” — Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (2002). ∆ Baudrillard’s work is coolly psychedelic, giving us the same sense of dizzying replication that we love in doppelgänger stories and much science fiction. He was […]

SACRAMENT, MALEFICE, SORCERY

Jean Baudrillard was a French social theorist who became known as a prophet of artificial reality. His most famous work, Simulacra and Simulation (1981), concerns the point at which representation loses connection with reality, and ultimately displaces it, trapping humanity in a synthetic world of copies of copies, images without originals, references without referents: a closed circuit of artificiality, where that word loses all meaning since it’s all there is. He defines the stages through which simulation must pass to arrive at our present moment, and projects a world which is neither real nor unreal, but hyperreal.

BAUDRILLARD in BANGKOK

Magritte, La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images), 1929 ∆ A simulacrum is a likeness, image or effigy; bearing a superficial similarity to its original, it is a placeholder or sign for the real thing, a representation rather than a replication. The instrumental suffix -crum signifies something which might be used in a simulation, […]