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From what I understand, having read parts of the book, is that he is making the discernment between Reality As It Really Exists and Reality As We Say It Really

From what I understand, having read parts of the book, is that he is making the discernment between Reality As It Really Exists and Reality As We Say It Really Exists. The first reality is something that Kant wrote about in depth, I believe. And the second reality is what Baudrillard was exploring in this book. An example of where he was going is one of the first things he describes about the difference: countries think that they gain power by having nuclear weapons - the capability to attack and defend. But the actual reality turned out to be the opposite - nuclear armed countries became handicapped through stalemate. So by not knowing the actual reality, they operated in a simulation of reality, or simulacrum, and ended up with results that they didn’t necessarily expect at the time.

wahern 6y ago
IIRC, Kant said that "true" reality is unknowable. Our faculties for understanding reality are constrained by constructs like space and time, and so any truth about reality that lays beyond those constructs is likewise beyond our grasp. I'm not sure what poststructuralists in general have to say about "true" reality. I take your word about what Baudrillard was getting it (it fits with what I've read about his writing and his activism, and the one or two essays of his I've read), but the legacy of poststructuralism--the body of thought unified by the notion that the reality we experience is socially constructed and arguably "arbitrary"--is a skepticism and even cynicism about the existence of objective truth. Poststructuralism didn't invent skepticism toward or rejection of objective truth, but they gave it an embodiment that at least superficially fits into our modern scientific age. I have read Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism", written around the same time as "Simulcra and Simulation" but arising in a completely different scholarly niche (international politics). IMO, it provides a more descriptivist, concrete explication of constructed social spaces and how we conflate them with "reality". After reading "Imagined Communities" you easily buy into the basic thesis that culture imbues our physical space with meaning and substance, often completely subsuming whatever "objectively real" characteristics we might use to describe things or events. And so it's easier to see where Baudrillard is coming from. But it's also easier to see where Baudrillard and other French poststructuralists go off the rails with unnecessary claims and conclusions. Notwithstanding the diversity in claims, they all basically seem to turn what Anderson deftly makes a trivial and obvious (in hindsight) observation into a pretense affirming their own personal beliefs--for example, tired and entirely predictable continental leftist ideas about the class struggle.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 6y ago
  Thanks for that reply - it is much appreciated.

wahern 6y ago

IIRC, Kant said that "true" reality is unknowable. Our faculties for understanding reality are constrained by constructs like space and time, and so any truth about reality that lays beyond those constructs is likewise beyond our grasp. I'm not sure what poststructuralists in general have to say about "true" reality. I take your word about what Baudrillard was getting it (it fits with what I've read about his writing and his activism, and the one or two essays of his I've read), but the legacy of poststructuralism--the body of thought unified by the notion that the reality we experience is socially constructed and arguably "arbitrary"--is a skepticism and even cynicism about the existence of objective truth. Poststructuralism didn't invent skepticism toward or rejection of objective truth, but they gave it an embodiment that at least superficially fits into our modern scientific age. I have read Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism", written around the same time as "Simulcra and Simulation" but arising in a completely different scholarly niche (international politics). IMO, it provides a more descriptivist, concrete explication of constructed social spaces and how we conflate them with "reality". After reading "Imagined Communities" you easily buy into the basic thesis that culture imbues our physical space with meaning and substance, often completely subsuming whatever "objectively real" characteristics we might use to describe things or events. And so it's easier to see where Baudrillard is coming from. But it's also easier to see where Baudrillard and other French poststructuralists go off the rails with unnecessary claims and conclusions. Notwithstanding the diversity in claims, they all basically seem to turn what Anderson deftly makes a trivial and obvious (in hindsight) observation into a pretense affirming their own personal beliefs--for example, tired and entirely predictable continental leftist ideas about the class struggle.

9wzYQbTYsAIc 6y ago
Thanks for that reply - it is much appreciated.