FourthBase wrote:Wow. 
A lesson in "humorology" I guess.
well, Baudrillard is sometimes called "the Walt Disney of metaphysics".
"His provocative writing style would make it in any case hard to take him literally."
<<Consumption, for Baudrillard, has assumed the guises of
creativity and fulfillment (or by contrast vacuity and alienation)
formerly ascribed only to labor (Baudrillard, 1988: 21). In so
doing, consumption has exposed a significant tendency of
modernity: the circulation of images as true value. (Baudrillard,
1988: 11)
As images shift and dissemble among themselves, they pursue
their own strategies which displace ordinary human agency" (Frank,
1992: 96). Consumers of these signs must constantly reposition
their sense of self in an arena of instability and quest for
satiation; yet always there are more images to be consumed and
more desires to be attended to (Baudrillard, 1981: 56).
The consequence, inevitable if it is understood from Baudrillard's
perspective, is that in modernity we do not engage ourselves with
the real, but with the pretense that has everywhere supplanted it.
(Baudrillard, 1988: 135).
In modernity, the play of images is prevalent in mass-
mediated discourses.
2. The play of images in mass-mediated discourses increasingly
supplements real experience by its simulations, to the extent
that it becomes difficult to distinguish between them. Our
personal experience becomes intertextual, real experience confused
with mass-mediated images.
3. Our intertextuality responds to the "fatal" strategies of
the consumption of images. These strategies may evade and even
negate personal intervention. As a result, human subjectivity
becomes a task, not a given. Human thoughts and feelings mingle
with the desire induced by images, which indefinitely postpone
fulfillment by sliding to other images, and yet others.
4. Our subjectivity is therefore that of the play of images
experienced in virtuality. This virtuality is not only the
movement of images in cyberspace, but also the intensification of
the autonomous mobility of images in everyday life, images without
a stable reference to "reality." In effect, virtuality has
become our mode of personal experience in modernity.>>
cyber.eserver.org/baudrill.txt
