Post-structuralism / Postmodernism

The French turn after structuralism: Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, Baudrillard. Meaning as unstable, the subject as constituted rather than given, grand narratives as suspect.

Baudrillard is the figure that matters here. Simulacra and Simulation (1981): the copy has lost its original, the map precedes the territory, and there is no real behind the sign to recover. His Disneyland argument, that it exists to conceal that the rest of America is Disneyland, is unavoidable prior art for the psychefacturing chapter.

DIFFERENTIATOR: Baudrillard is doing ONTOLOGY, the loss of the real. Psychefacturing is doing PRODUCTION, the manufacture of persons. His question is whether anything is real. The other question is who made the character I am wearing. Note also that simulacra and The Matrix are incompatible with each other, and Baudrillard said so: the film keeps a true world under the false one, which is exactly what simulacra denies.

· 1966– · active · influence 8/10