The New Philosophers and the End of Metaphysics/Philosophy

1. The New Philosophers and the End of Metaphysics/Philosophy • Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality

2. Post-Modernity and Literature • Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality On the Exactitude of Science Borges Text:…. In that Empire, the Araft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of on singleProvince occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, The entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.

3. The New Philosophers and the End of Metaphysics/Philosophy • Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality On the Exactitude of Science The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness wasit, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters.

4. The New Philosophers and the End of Metaphysics/Philosophy • Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality On the Exactitude of Science In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins, tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658.

5. The New Philosophers and the End of Metaphysics/Philosophy • Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality • Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. • The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. • Henceforth, it is the map that preceded the territory PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map.

6. The New Philosophers and the End of Metaphysics/Philosophy • Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality • It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself. • For it is with the same Imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all the real, coincide with their simulation models.

7. The New Philosophers and the End of Metaphysics/Philosophy • Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality • So it is with simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation. The latter starts from the principle that the sign and the real are equivalent (even if this equivalence is utopian, it is a fundamental axiom).(sing-referent) • Conversely, simulation starts from the utopia of this principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as reversion and death sentence to every reference. (sing-non-referent)

8. The New Philosophers and the End of Metaphysics/Philosophy • Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality • Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum. • No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept: rather, genetic miniaturization is the dimension of simulation.

9. The New Philosophers and the End of Metaphysics/Philosophy • Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality • The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models - and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. • It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplicat-ion, nor even of parody, only simulation.

10. The New Philosophers and the End of Metaphysics/Philosophy • Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality • It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real. • Simulation is characterised by a precession of the model, the models come first. • Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.

11. The New Philosophers and the End of Metaphysics/Philosophy • Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality • The architectural graphism is that of the end of monopo-ly; the two W.T.C. towers. perfect parallelepipeds a –mile high on a square base, perfectly balanced and blind communicating vessels. • The fact that there are two of them signifies the end of all competition, the end of all original reference. • For the sign to be pure, it has to duplicate itself: it is the duplication of the sign which destroys its meaning.

12. The New Philosophers and the End of Metaphysics/Philosophy Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality • This is what Andy Warhol demonstrates also; the multiple replicas of Marilyn's face are there to show at the same time the death of the original and the end of representation. • The two towers of the W.T.C. are the visible sign of the closure of the system (the end of history) in a vertigo of duplication, while the other skyscrapers are each of them the original moment of a system constantly transcending itself in a perpetual crisis and self challenge.

13. The New Philosophers and the End of Metaphysics/Philosophy Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality • The hyperreal represents a much more advanced phase, in the sense that even this contradiction between the real and the imaginary is effaced.

14. The New Philosophers and the End of Metaphysics/Philosophy • Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality • The very definition of the real becomes that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. • This is contemporaneous with a science that postulates that a process can be perfectly reproduced in a set of given conditions.

15. The New Philosophers and the End of Metaphysics/Philosophy • Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality • In fact, we should turn our definition of hyperrealism inside out: It is reality itself today that is hyperrealist. • It is then that art enters into its indefinite reproduction: all that reduplicates itself, even if it be the everyday and banal reality, falls by the token under the sign of art, and becomes esthetic.

16. The New Philosophers and the End of Metaphysics/Philosophy • Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality • Art can become a reproducing machine (Andy Warhol), without ceasing to be art. • And so art is dead because its critical transcendence is gone, but because reality itself has been confused with its own image. • Reality no longer has the time to take on the appearance of reality.

17. The New Philosophers and the End of Metaphysics/Philosophy • Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality • Thus we attend to the End of History • A truly universal consumer culture equated with a de-ideologised contemporary world. • The motors which propelled modernity’s progressive, teleological history all but run down and burned out.

18. The New Philosophers and the End of Metaphysics/Philosophy • Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality • A remarkable consensus that has developed in the past couple of centuries over the viability and desirability of economic and political liberalism. It is this consensus around liberal democracy as the final form of government that I have called the end of history. • Dialectical materialism’s class struggle has been resolved by consumer society as realized in the West, and aspired to by the rest.

19. The New Philosophers and the End of Metaphysics/Philosophy • Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality x • The egalitarianism of modern America represents essentially the attainment of the class-less society envisioned by Marx. • This presumed consensus is represented not as ideological, by virtue precisely of its ‘universality’, but as ‘post-ideological’.

20. The New Philosophers and the End of Metaphysics/Philosophy • Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality • Ideology ending in consensus: notions of ideology as misrecognition evaporate with universal agreement on premises. • The end of ideological conflict is also the end of spatial conflict, of the territorial imperialism classically associated with nineteenth-century nationalisms.

21. The New Philosophers and the End of Metaphysics/Philosophy • Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality • A de-ideologised world is one where economic concerns are predominant, where no ideological grounds exists for major conflict between nations, and where, consequently, the use of military force becomes less legitimate’. • Such conflict as may occur in the future will be between those contracting pockets of the globe ‘still in history’ (or ideology) and those rapidly expanding areas that are post-historical.

22. The New Philosophers and the End of Metaphysics/Philosophy • Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality • For the post Marxist Jean Baudrillard, postmodernism is ‘post-ideological. • For Baudrillard, it is not longer possible to speak of ideology as ‘false consciousness’ since there is no longer a realm of the real against which to measure the fictiveness of representations.

23. The New Philosophers and the End of Metaphysics/Philosophy • Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality • As subjects (or consumer-effects) of media releases, Baudrillardian postmoderns inhabit the imaginary or the hyperreal, where the image no longer reflects, conceals or misrepresents an originary real, but engenders and is the real. • The humanist metanarrative of enlightenment, of humanity’s inevitable progress toward self-knowledge and emancipation through the agencies of reason, science and technology is gone.

24. The New Philosophers and the End of Metaphysics/Philosophy • Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality • The Marxist metanarrative of emancipation from exploitation through the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat is also gone. • The liberal capitalist metanarrative of humanity’s emancipation from poverty through the operations of the free market is an illusion.

25. The New Philosophers and the End of Metaphysics/Philosophy • Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality • These teleological grand narratives, which once provided historiography with such grounding universals as human knowledge or reason, labour, class, and capital, have evaporated and we attend to an apocalyptic era.

26. The New Philosophers and the End of Metaphysics/Philosophy • Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality • History, to borrow Fredric Jameson’s term, has become depthless; the past as referent has been effaced, leaving only representations, texts, pseudo-events, images without originals.