don’t mind me just padding my goodreads stats.


but actually these three essays written before, during, and after the gulf war, were interesting. admittedly the political commentary was mostly over my head, i’m not familiar with the titular war basically at all, but mixed with the political is a sociological commentary that is genuinely fascinating and prescient if not wholly thorough.
in brief he outlines a caustic line between technological development with increasing virtuality. essential arguing that existence in the televisual comes at the expense of the tangible, and that the symptoms of that loss have robbed even our most primordial physical acts (war) of their physical existence.
i wish he dwelled more on the philosophical aspects of the essays, but i’m assuming he left most of that for simulacra and simulation, and at the very least this has made me want to read that more.

Named after Giraudoux's The Trojan War Will Not Take Place, Baudrillard proposes here a logic and temporality of speculation for analyzing (post-)modern military conflict: like the dramatic irony of attempting to stave off a conflict which has already taken place, the military and media apparatus prepares for (non-)events which will (not) take place, like the US sending 12,000 coffins over in response to Saddam claiming they are unwilling to tolerate 10,000 deaths, preparing for deaths which will not occur specifically so that it can be said that they will occur in the future. Time, therefore, is never in joint, like a stock market crash in anticipation of a future collapse (which then ends up triggering the collapse itself). Hostages, therefore, become currency in this symbolic exchange, just as the virtual ends up having effects on the real. The question of representation therefore becomes crucial, no longer a mimesis but rather folded back into reality as the immanent plane on which military strategy takes place.

I think Baudrillard is best read for fun

its happening again

tamo fudido