Mayo - Post 9/26... Baudrillard + top 5 PoMo moments this week

"Knowledge is itself part of the world, though precisely part of the world in its profound illusoriness, which consists in having no necessary relation to knowledge." -The Intelligence Of Evil or The Lucidity Pact

Baudrillard, to me, is like the philosophical equivalent of a great first date... Plenty of things to talk about, lots in common, and always leaves me wanting more. Oh, and, er... French, too.

The above would explain the quote from outside the required text, as I never seem to be able to stop reading Baudrillard once I've started. So, after finishing the reading, I headed straight to my local corporate bookstore chain and predictably shoplifted a copy of the book quoted above, and also re-read/wrote my favorite passages from Impossible Exchange and The Anti-Aesthetic, which inevitably lead to the internal questioning of "how difficult would it be to get a (real) job with the word NIHILIST tattooed across my knuckles, do I care, and what is a real job if reality functions only to hide the truth of nothingness anyway?" I digress...

JB seems to be more of a poet than a theorist, a rock-star philosopher of sorts. It is no wonder that someone eventually spun his theories into a slice of cinematic summer blockbuster sci-fi, although, to my taste, a silly one at that. Being in my own mode of hyper-media intake, I became curious, and, sure enough, JB did eventually respond to the Wachowski Bro's ultimate Americanization of simulacra's chief sage. Much to be expected, it turns out that his critique could be best summed up with words recontexturalized from the source, "To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn't". Ouch.

The first of my top five PoMo moments ties into some of what JB writes in Impossible Exchange on photography, "...resisting movement, flows, and ever greater speed with the stillness of the photograph... Above all, resisting the automatic tide of images, their perpetual succession. In which it is not only the mark, the poignant detail of the object which is lost, but also the moment of the photograph, which is immediately past and gone, irreversible and hence always nostalgic."

The Buttons Camera has no optical device, but records the exact time that its button is pressed and a picture is "taken". Later, using WiFi technology, it finds a picture uploaded to the web with the same time code, and this picture appears in the viewfinder.

The Suspicious Looking Device serves just that purpose, and none other.

Noah takes a photo of himself everyday for 6 years, a six minute film on YouTube.

While thumbing through the new issue of Beautiful/Decay, I was pleased to find that Umberto Eco's theories on signifiers are being applied to street art.

Last, least and undeniably the most junk culture capitalist crap, I give you The Jimmy Dean Chocolate Chip Flavored Pancakes And Sausage On A Stick!



I wish that was an empty signifier...