Baudrillardage

Baudrillard is dead. The prophet of simulation is dead. But in the age of simulacrum and simulation, can one really die? Baudrillard is a mere image now, but was he (or we) ever more than an image shimmering in the desert of the real?

…because Baudrillard knows that nature is the first simulator of the simulacrum:

"Snow no longer falls from on high. It lands only at those venues designated as winter resorts" (Cool Memories).

…and that because theory has become inseparable from anything and everything, oh how sweet the days of alienation and critical distance…

"For us everything is predictable: we have extraordinary analytical means but no situation to analyse. We live theoretically well beyond our means: hence our deep melancholy" (The Transparency of Evil).

"Every event today is virtually inconsequential, open to all possible interpretations, none of which could determine its meaning" (Fatal Strategies)

….because:

"Popular fame is what we should all aspire to. Nothing will ever match the distracted gaze of the woman serving in the butcher’s who has seen you on television" (Cool Memories).

…because Baudrillard always believed in not believing in a world before the word, in the beginning was the word:

“As to whether language is the trace of the imperfection of the world, no story better demonstrates this than John's. Up until the age of 16, John, a happy and handsome youth, gifted in every sense, had never spoken. He had never uttered a single word until the day when, suddenly, at tea-time, he said: "I would like a little sugar." His ecstatic mother cried out: "But, John, you speak! Why didn't you ever say anything?" And John replied, "Until now, everything was perfect” (The Perfect Crime)

…because Schopenhauer’s all is will has become digital; the white ontology of boredom still remains inscribed in the screen eyes of our fading reflections…

“Stuck for hours on the motorway with his family, a tourist declares: `Well, you know, we're on holiday. Here or the beach, what does it matter?' The need to be nowhere - this is what drives the hordes out on to the roads. And nowhere means anywhere but home. It's the same with work and leisure: drudgery in the one place, drudgery in the other. The moment of freedom comes in moving from one drudgery to another. And if you go away, it isn't to wipe out the effects of the eight daily hours of forced labour, but to compensate for not being forced to work twenty-four hours a day, as the higher executives do - people who have no need of holidays” (Cool memories IV)

….because Baudrillard is Camus’ Sisyphus revisited for the mediatic age:

“Ants, too, must know that God is dead, since they engage in such frantic activity. Is it to avoid internal revolts and boredom that they have developed such a relent­less programme (not too different, perhaps, from the human race)? Have they developed a cult of the absurd or some crazed ritual for turning life and its mean­ing to their own perverse ends? Have they invented a perfect model of cloning, the only way of guaranteeing the eternity of a species and solving the problem of indi­vidual existence? A wonderful hypothesis, but how can we know? Let them speak, on walking around these ants, let them confess! What is their message? Yet they just go enormous distances to bring back things that are actually plentiful on the anthill (in this, too, they are not so different from the human race)” (Cool memories IV)

And last but not least, because Cioran is his bittersweet simulacrum, minus the either or choice between reality and illusion:

“Like the disabled child who sued his mother for not having worn her safety belt, when she was pregnant, in the crash which left him disabled, soon all children will be able to sue their parents for having brought them into the world” (Cool Memories IV)

Baudrillard for ever….we won’t miss you, you are the age...

Gorgeous A -Trance the world - (in 80 days)

She travels around the world, around all the trance festivals of the world: Fullmoon, Soulclipse, Solstice, Omni, Rainbow…Gorgeously curvaceous, beautifully precise in her manner, dressed in an impossible mix between the darkness shades of Goth and the kaleidoscopic colours of psychedelia…a psychedelic trance angel that wears Yves Saint Laurent, Opium and Gucci…all the more beautiful in77 that these logos of luxury and pretension will soon be ripped to pieces and soiled by lustful hands, dust and dancing bodies…An deep sea oriental goddess far too refined for the gyrating crusties surrounding her…a top-model who has finally escaped her gloss and make-up cage into the trance freedom of the open-air. A flesh made sculpture…if geometry had an origin she would be “it”…

She trance travels and pursues a worldly adventure of freedom and transgression. She encounters bodies that come in all races, shapes and sizes - from all over the world…seeking in tandem a hedonic transfiguration through the pills & thrills of dance, nature, artifice and chemical disunity.

Just image…imagine, she provokingly whispers…a life purely lived on rhythm, light, and chemical intensity – time and time again, only to get higher and higher on the vibes of life itself. Her eyes sparkle with excitement as she tells me her story…She only lives for the music of the mind, the lust of bodies and the dance of the soul…trance, Goa trance, dark trance, psytrance…all around the world, the same vibe, the same dance, the same beat…Rio de Janeiro, LA, Madrid, Amsterdam, Bombay, Tokyo, etc. secret and not so secret festivals are located and zoomed in by eagle eye Amelia, or “Gorgeous A”, as she is nicknamed by her party network…

How does she finance such a lavish and intensive life style? I ask…she didn’t need to follow up on my question; the mischievous look gave it all away. I guess that one thing that being beauty graced has over mere mortals is the actuality of a life lived in pure immanence, a life of pure immanence. Her life fuels her/self; she is all she needs, she lives off herself: no matter, no work - there is no distance between what you fell and what you need.

She pays her dues in fluids of semen and milk. Amelia is indifferent to the female or male side of things: young or old, mothers to be or fathers on the run…it’s all flux and fluids for her…She is the very embodiment of Pierre Klossowski’s philosophical fantasy of “living money”; following in footsteps of the “passion utopia” of Charles Fourier, Klossowski imagined a “payment” made out of libidinal sensations; impersonal transactions of what bodies could give and receive: a kind of “universal prostitution” without the commodity of money to enact the exchange.

Amelia is her own capital, so she can afford the best of what capitalism has to offer: global trance.

Amelia does “it” in secret however. Only an elected few will ever know what sweet transgressions lurk behind those emerald sparkling eyes of hers…always keen to get down and dirty with the beats, the beasts and the lasers…

As if her life was not intense enough, like a Wildeian Lord Henry, I further whisper sweet transgressions into Amelia/Dorian not so bright mind. After all, I got all theory she could possibly ask for: the Batailles, Foucaults, Deleuzes, and the Artauds etc. She voraciously opens up to these sweet lullabies…I entice her for more confessions whilst implanting here and there, more mind fields for her to transgress, more limits to absolve and dissolve… As psychedelic guru John Lilly says in the “centre of the cyclone”:

“In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind, there are no limits”.

A game with the limitless cosmos, a gamble she seems to play to win…