Fragments (Radical Thinkers) [Paperback]

If Jean Baudrillard wrote music it would indeed transcend the musical languages and styles of modernity to popular tex/mex forms,it would have the negativity of Schoenberg mixed with the traditional beauty of Mozart with the energy of Joanie Jett,the subversiveness of The Dead Kennedys and the directness of Sharon Crow;Baudrillard indeed has paid his dues writing from the late Sixties,he also became frustrated when the revolution didn't come as quickly as expected. His work today cuts across many genres. I know painters who don't paint until they read him first. Also philosophers wanting a good time,those who need to escape the stifling air of academia,and the interlocking complexity that can be a part of todays philosophic scene of intertextual interdiscipline without being committed in anyone direction. But to call Baudrillard an compact anarchist would be too cruel his thought has too much discipline of it,although that's how his language comes across. Yet he has a deep-rooted feeling for humanity; he can't quite seem to find a place for its demise. He wants to see something happen,well people still make sex and art,and music. I think behind all the dark-edged pessimism that emanates from his sentence constructions there is a need to emote, Baudrillard is a new genre artist,there is no label yet for who he is like Hannible Lecter. For instance on politics,"There is no need to attack politicians. They are engaged in spontaneous self-destruction. You simply have to be firm about not going to their aid." Baudrillard has seen and will seen things going,jettisoning down the tubes for some time to come. And that's why we need him. He has a gift for picking the smallest nuance of reality, the tiniest particle of the life-world as a means toward whatever is larger. A political system and institution. We find value in the fragments,Wittgenstein said this of God: I always find other things in Baudrillard than what he means. Like danger zones, like tripping over a cliff,The beauty in a Chicago ho! t-dog,yet it can kill you. "In Amazonia,certain butterflies simulate the markings of their poisonous fellows to protect themselves. When you have the good fortune to be poisonous,you have to use deception." Since the world has long stood on its philosophic head(Hegel/Marx), we can find comfort in being "Other" or so it seems. To be outcast is cool soemtimes, it doesn't help pay any bills,you need to be a Derridean for that to find a normative world. To Baudrillard all culture is worth the trip to understand it. Although you feel his European roots all the time, with the heavies he introduces us to Canetti,Pessoa. He always speaks within eye-shot of a monument. Years of theory does that to you. And he searches the mysteries of expression,from one fountain head one manifold source,culture going over Niagara Falls,expression teeming with amoeba,paramecium. He also is/was the first to speak on postmodernity,another stick in the side of art. In fact we owe a debt to him for taking the rigours of the postmodernist credo to a new level of cognition. Composers would never have been able to distinguish five strains of tango without it. He finds meaning in anything today,antique sales in Pennsylvania Even pornography has a double meaning. The skinny porno-queen blond who ran for the Italian Pariliament, (La Cicciolina),she married Jeff Koons who also accelerated the postmodern language to its head,carnal ectoplasm. Baudrillard speaks of the ends of things. And since we are at the end of languages,styles,meanings,subjects and objects,we are at the beginning of them as well. Too bad Baudrillard can't give us any third base guidance. Well who can? I hear he lectures at UCLA today. But I love Baudrillard because he looks for meaning anywhere. In Egyptian pyramids(ultimate space) inside,in a hermit's life,in boredom, in Andy Warhohl,in the scar on a womens face,which lends her all her charm. I think Baudrillard's next zone should be on the mystery of women throughout the ages. "Not to think any! more. To be like a dog. To be in one's head like a dog in a kennel." After you read Baudrillard you can get high from the Los Angeles Yellow Pages. He can also look beyond his own coffe-table, The French conceit that Chernobyl didn't cross to Paris,1,000 French impervious to Russian fission. Of course the dark side to all this is that Baudrillard sees us as all in a zoo,that we all have basic fatal attraction instincts that can put the rabbit into boiling water faster than the anyone.

not the best introduction to Baudrillard but once you've become a disiple.... nice readable inspiring chunks for those of us too busy to read theory all the time but wish to think....

Baudrillard embraces theory as art and art as theory.

We are all free:free to project one's desires onto produced goods. ha de ha ha