My humble abode..
regardless of the naughty ramblings of Sacha Blumen!

A fine, and hearty day, to all of you nit-picker’s, contemplating your navels for dust-motes of fine-tuned wordings, designed to confuse an aleady confused world!

(Spanks to you all, for giving the Devil his due!)

Well. I’m off…..

..back to THE MATRIX!!

spank* and, double Spank* Sacha!!!!

Muawwwwh! ~~(^_^)~~~

xx,Dat Guy!

I phoned mum to ask her what the saying was and got Dad instead and yeah, a lovely dad-son pointless argument was enjoyed by all, and in so doing I kinda forgot that i’d already decided that sauce wasn’t right.

True story.

It is wholly understandable response.

Invig, that is what the recommended link was for, for heaven

Eg, I don’t like the use of matrix when array is the intended word. (I’ve noticed this in a number of places.) I suppose I just see it as sloppiness. But language changes, and who am I to say what people should or shouldn’t use? It’s just a personal thing.

(PS The fake turkey science look pretty weak, btw:

1. Anyone who has ever served in the US military can tell you that the military usually uses a regular cooked turkey, i.e. not fake, as a display turkey.

The “usually” destroys this point. Dinner with the pres was scarcely “usual”.

2. The New York Times explicitly stated in an article that the turkey was not fake.

Hah. Nuff said.

3. The Washington Post explicitly stated in an article that the turkey was not fake.

How do you know they didn’t just copy the Times?

4. Milbloggers, who were there at dining hall when President Bush walked around with the supposedly fake turkey, blogged that the turkey was not in fact fake.

How do we know they didn’t lie? Is there any continuous undoctered film of the turkey, from being photographed to someone actually eating any of it? Was it all eaten? Could it have been half-fake?

So is it easy to be mistaken about a supposedly fake turkey?)

I think CS should have done his best to explain the philosopher in question.

Invig, that is what the recommended link was for, for heaven’s sake (help me lord). On what authority do you invoke this standard in any event? Why do you imagine moreover that I have the slightest desire to explain him to anyone, let alone your good self, let alone that I “should”? Do you think blogging is or should be some sort of free personal tuition service on demand and in a form specified by the customer? Why are you commenting, come to think of it, if you don’t like the post? Of all the blog joints, in all the towns, in all the world, you had to walk into mine …

Sacha, if you had followed the recommended link (cs says, for what feels like the 200th time), you might have got the point of ‘matrix’. Baudrillard used the term as something of a synonym for simulacrum, which is his most famous concept. The term was also adopted by the Wachowski brothers for their popular film trilogy, which is Baudrillard’s most well-known appearance in popular culture. It is, hence, an entirely appropriate headline for this post on at least two scores. In a further subtlety, it is “matrix” with a small “m”, because Baudrillard himself rejected the films his work inspired, as also explained in the recommended link.

More generally, in blogging a brief personal appreciation on a little known French philosopher who happens to mean a good deal to me, I did not anticipate any interest whatsoever. I know, ‘no-one expects the Spanish Inquisition’ … But haven’t people got anything better to do than effectively complain that I did not actually cut and paste the linked article in this blog?

Could it be that it is because your views are like the non-fake turkey… uninformed, inaccurate and (in the final analysis) utterly trivial?

Actually, it is easy to make a mistake about whether a turkey is fake or not, because it is not only trivia, we cannot know for ourselves, for we merely have an image, and the suggestion that it was fake has been repeatedly published as such by countless sources all over the world. Very few know whether the turkey was fake or not, and virtually no one could care less. The point is meaningless, approximating, at best, the significance of a typo.

1. Anyone who has ever served in the US military can tell you that the military usually uses a regular cooked turkey, i.e. not fake, as a display turkey.

2. The New York Times explicitly stated in an article that the turkey was not fake.

3. The Washington Post explicitly stated in an article that the turkey was not fake.

4. Milbloggers, who were there at dining hall when President Bush walked around with the supposedly fake turkey, blogged that the turkey was not in fact fake.

So is it easy to be mistaken about a supposedly fake turkey?

Sure. But only if you’re such a wanker that you cannot even
Google
the damn thing. Pity that this description covers a enormous number of people all over the world.

Allow me to explain a couple of things.

Firstly, I believe that ‘lack of understanding’ is fairly endemic in many areas, not least of which is human society and individual experience within it. By ‘lack of understanding’ I mean that fundamental ‘variables’ of the system have not been identified (but that is of course based upon my perspective – which is totally unrelated to the arts – and that is not a criticism btw). Trouble is, the less ‘fundamental’ an understanding, the more inherent contradictions it will contain and the more difficult it will be to express concisely.

I see much of philosophy as a ‘non-systematic’ attempt to understand how society, and by implication, our individual part in it, works. That it is not easily explained in one paragraph is not surprising since the philosophy itself generally does not approach ‘fundamental’. This is of course not surprising since the subject matter is so complex and the philosopher by necessity works largely alone. However, adherents to the philosophy do not help by preventing it being discussed (and hopefully evolved) openly.

It is only through repeated review and vetting of ideas through many minds that we collectively reach nearer to the point of ‘fundamentalness’. And the use of this invented word further illustrates the point. I believe we all have a duty to put our ego aside in the search for greater understanding, and spelling or grammatical mistakes similarly should take a back seat to communicating our best interpretation fearlessly.

On another point, if that interpretation must include historical or cultural context to explain the idea (rather than justify it’s flaws and limitations) then fine, but too often I read swathes of verbage analysing and discussing historical context. As someone interested in the pure mechanics of the idea, I find this to be an indulgent distraction (not to say the perspective of others is not valid, but recognising that differences exist avoids insult).

So my saying

As there has been no attempt by the admirer to supply their own interpretation (rather than someone else

People who say that stuff is too complicated to explain generally don

I

On the other hand, it is not easy to make a mistake about who is pomo and who is not on a thread that supplies a direct link with a recommendation to an article that explains that Baudrillard was not, with full scholarly references and a comprehensive bibliography, and which also includes an explanation of the late philosopher’s relationship to Durkheim. Anyone with sound eyes and even the slightest shred of intellectual integrity would have known the truth of that, unless they refused to go to the link and read – to what purpose?

It would help if your language was clearer, less pompous and supplied an argument with references instead of privileging vacuous idiosyncratic personal assertions, Rafe. Perhaps you would be advised to write in French or German, as blankly asserting that something makes no sense to you in the light of such readily available scholarship just looks plain silly in English.

As for the turkey, anyone with sound eyes would have known the truth of that story but the fake verion of the story has been circulated over and over – to what purpose?

On the topic of Baudrillard I am intrigued to find that he is operating in the tradition of Durkheim because over the last year or so I have been re-reading Durkheim and some of his leading commentators.

If I have got hold of Durkheim

I was agreeing with you that he should not be thought of as being a postmodernist, if that wasn’t clear.

The best introduction and overview by far, I staunchly maintain, is my linked article, unless you read Merrin’s full book, or go back to Gane. The relationship of Buadrillard to Durkheim is, moreover, rather more than an important clue, for it supplies a conceptual framework through which his entire standpoint can be understood as fully integrated, and indeed profoundly conservative in some central respects. As for postmodernism, I cannot see how he can possibly be grouped in that camp at all, not by disinterested analysis and certainly not by his own testimony. Perhaps the only thing he has in common with postmodernists is that he can be difficult to follow, yet he has the wonderful compensation of never being less than amusing.

The funnist thing, however, is that tim blair has mistakenly reported the po-mo line, while complaining about an obituary that mistakenly refers to Bush’s famous turkey. A fake report complaining about a fake. Who’s the turkey?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard