The Illusion of The End [Baudrillard, Jean] (in edit)

Within the frame of his theory, how would I form a rebuttle and spare him the "excess" read? His claim renders a rebuttle as a sample of the situation on the ground, as a source, and again as a sense of excess speculation. An iPod advanced the earbug and allowed for the human race to rock and jive to any song at any time (granted your iPod spent the previous night on the charger). I would like to mention how different a situation becomes when under the influence of "that" song in a new context; what is more, the influence of a familiar voice or memory in an unfamiliar setting or state of mind. (Did you ever think on the oddity of being raped, attacked, or murdered to the sounds of your favorite tune?) To better illustrate the visual he sees in the current state of affairs, Baudrillard organized his theory and thought in a series of synonyms like a series of cartoons fit to fill the comic section of Sunday's news.

"'All mankind suddenly left reality' irresistibly evokes the idea of that escape velocity a body requires to free itself from the gravitational field of a star or planet.

This piece counters my experience by offering modernity as a series; an accumulation of things, sounds, or images that 'escapes velocity', with the result that we have flown free of the referential sphere of the real and of history. Such a diversion of the "real" and of the "history" implies that the two are separable, exist in a league of their own, but does ever a moment pass in reel that we do not refer to history for aid in the situation on the ground? Refer to military strategy and the wet knot that holds present conflict at length with yesterday's quarrels.

"So far as history is concerned, its telling has become impossible because that telling is, by definition, the possible recurrence of a sequence of meanings."

Cued in said recurrence is a line of careers or specifications. Take it lightly. Take it heavily. However, embedded within the telling of all history, no matter its weight, is the option to consider the event in pieces or in full.
Ever should an event apply to my life in full; in body, mind, soul, religious belief, cultural tradition, mathematical reasoning, engineering innovation (…)? Should every event be dissolved in specialty like a tumor of many different dimensions and in pertinence like measurements necessary for calculating volume? If such is the reality of our existence, a “recurrence of a sequence of meanings”, then Baudrillard’s claim is less volatile in validity. But you will never cross a person who does not yearn to show and tell a story.

"...through the impulse for total dissemination and circulation, every event is granted its own liberation ( an energy for rupture and change)...In order to be disseminated to infinity, it has to be fragmented like a particle...Every set of phenomena, whether cultural totality or sequence of events, has to be fragmented, disjointed, so that it can be sent down the circuits; every kind of language has to be resolved into a binary formulation so that it can circulate not, any longer, in our memories, but in the luminous, electronic memory of the computers."

I recall a fear from childhood that played through the items that I would carry out of my house if there were a fire inside. Within this same vein I credit my need to have a copy of my work, pictures, and music on hard drive as well as on paper or CD. "Codes of language, perception, and practice are criticized and rendered partially invalid." (Michel Foucault An Order of Things) The partiality of anything still retains something of the whole. Moreover, I am not certain that a day passes without the conquest for understanding the whole. The privy of knowing in full a part of the whole (like being a math major and having a concentration in Calculus) is common practice around most every corner of the Earth. I say corner in reference to the man made dimension of life. What mother-nature has made was done so without many corners.

I have read that light and gravity are products of higher dimensions and what is more, that light bends under gravitational force. What does the author mean by "gravitational effect" ("which keeps all bodies in orbit") within the context of his piece? Moreover the inquisition at present, what things are present in my daily dimension that are in fact products of higher historical dimensions?

"Every political, historical and cultural fact possesses a kinetic energy which wrenches it from its own space and propels it into a hyperspace where, since it will never return, it loses all meaning"

"The inert matter of the social is not produced by a lack of exchanges, information or communication, but by the multiplication and saturation of exchanges. It is the product of the hyperdensity of cities, commodities, messages and circuits. It is the cold star of the social and, around that mass, history is also cooling. Events follow one upon another, canceling each other out in a state of indifference.

This time we have the opposite situation: history, meaning and progress are no longer able to reach their escape velocity. They are no longer able to pull away from this overdense body which slows their trajectory, which slows time ot he point where, right now, perception and imagination of the future are beyond us. All social, historical and temporal transcendence is absorbed by that mass in its silent immanence....[History] is no longer able to transcend itself, to envisage its own finality, to dream of its own end; it is being buried beneath its own immediate effect, worn out in special effects, imploding into current events....It's effects are accelerating, but its meaning is slowing inexorably (meaning impossible to stop or prevent). It will eventually come to a stop and be extinguished like light and time in the vicinity of an infinitely dense mass..."

Whether the universe is expanding to infinity or retracting towards an infinitely dense, infinitely small nucleus depends on its critical mass. Speculation on this idea is in itself infinite by virtue of the possible invention of new particles. Cue Large Hadron Collider
, a modern experiment in the physical field of creation.

Like the introduction of salt to grass, or of a metal bike to wet skies there exist several engagements of man without a proposition for control in the future. However, I fail to see man’s story as one such engagement.

"Has the history, the movement, of the species reached the escape velocity required to triumph over the inertia of the mass?"

Man is only in mass when his neighbor stands to critique.

"Everywhere we find the same stereophonic effect, the same effect of absolute proximity to the real, the same effect of simulation."

“Sympathy has the dangerous power of assimilating, of rendering things identical to one another, of mingling them, or causing their individuality to disappear—and thus of rendering them foreign to what they were before.” (Foucault)

Would Baudrillard go so far as to claim that the news reels in sympathy to the event in frame?

"Where is the high fidelity threshold beyond which music disappears as such?

We have passed that limit where, by dint of the sophistication of events and information, history ceases to exist as such."

In recent history, you can find the stories of men who interrogate and torture their enemies by excess amplification of hard rock. In college my dad was subject to endless rotations of Ravel’s “Boléro” as a part of his induction into the fraternity of his choice.

"The original essence of music, the original concept of history have disappeared because we shall never again be able to isolate them from their model of perfection which is at the same time their model of simulation, the model of their enforced assumption into a hyper-reality which cancels them out."

“The transformation of music into noise was a planetary process by which mankind was entering the historical phase of ugliness.” (Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

There is an opinion that I am unable to articulate, but one that I can see by pulling on the strings of other disciplines, fields, and theories.

"...'action' in the cinematographic sense, and 'auction', the selling-off of the event on the overheated news market. The event captured not, as it used to be, in action, but in speculation and chain reactions spinning off towards the extremes of a facility with which interpretation can no longer keep pace."

Such sheath addresses why a news station might host an event (the source of sound in speculation--in mass reproduction across print, TV, and radio. News is a business as is education with a need to make for finance, a need for participation, and a need for innovation that places an anchor above the leading competitor.

"In contrast to this 'fulfilled' order of time, the liberation of the 'real' time of history, the production of a linear, deferred time may seem a purely artificial process."

"Where do we get the idea that what must be accomplished must come at the end of time and match up with some incalculable appointed term or other?"

"Admittedly, this kind of sly, surreptitious intervention on the side of the void against the grotesque. Ubuesque infatuation with news and the political scene was merely a dream and, by dint of being secret and enigmatic, no more came into being, in the end, than did the events themselves.

"We had to find, in this event strike, the thread running through, which is that of deterrence (DEFER, DIFFERANCE) [is what causes something not to take place], the baleful form which presides over the nullity of our age... events which do not in any way advance history, but rather run it backwards, back along the opposite slope, unintelligible to our historical sense (only things which move in the direction of history [le sens de l'histoire] have historical meaning [sens historique]), events which no longer have a negative (progressive, critical or revolutionary) potency since their only negativity is in the fact of their not taking place.

"Yet it seems we are tired of fuelling the end of history with simulacra of modernity and are entering, with recent events upon a phase of de-simulation.

"The criteria of truth have been supplanted by the principle of credibility (which is also the principle of statistics and opinion polls), and this is the true guiding principle of news...a reality which is now uncertain, paradoxical, random, hyper-real, filtered by the medium, cut adrift by its own image."

(Think of the romantic state of Cold War certainty.)

“In the case of the Romanian revolution, it was the faking of the dead in Timisoara which aroused a kind of moral indignation and raised the problem of the scandal of 'disinformation' or, rather, of information itself as scandal.

Is ever the information that takes the face of a scandal, or the face of delivery, the facet of the specific syntax and source that brought it into light?

"Being blackmailed by violence and death, especially in a noble and revolutionary cause, was felt to be worse than the violence itself, was felt to be a parody of history." THE SUCCULENT IMMINENCE OF DEATH (it's what's for breakfast!)

"Anticipation of effects, morbid simulation, emotional blackmale. Nothing is news if it does not pass through that horizon of the virtual, that hysteria of the virtual--not in the psychological sense, but in the sense of a compulsion for what is presented, in all bad faith, as real to be consumed as unreal."

(Think about the game played on camping grounds that simulates someone throwing up in a neighbor's hand. The neighbor then looks at his/her hands and thinks, "Yuck!" then thinks, "Yumm!" and in turn induces vomit from him or herself and looks to the hands of the next person and so on and so on. The oddity of the game is that it sounds awful, but you're not really throwing up; the simple gesture of cupped hands solicits an image so vivid that it actually induces nausea.)

"...images without a negative, and hence without negativity and without reference."

"When television becomes the strategic space of the event, it sets itself up as a deadly self-reference..."

"From the moment the studio becomes the strategic centre, and the screen the only site of appearance, everyone wants to be on it at all costs, or else gathers in the street in the glare of the cameras, and these, indeed actually film one another. The street becomes an extension of the studio, that is, of the non-site of the event, of the virtual site of the event. The street itself becomes a virtual space. Site of the definitive confusion of masses and medium, of the real-time confusion of act and sign."
"SCENIC ABDUCTION"

"...we are forced to see even though they are virtually dead, these dead prisoners shot a second time to meet the needs of news." I wonder if I could introduce morality and reason to the above statement (which is obviously laden in negative air).

"By manipulating themselves, they cause us spontaneously to swallow their fiction. We bear the same responsibility as they do. Or, rather, there is no responsibility anywhere."

"When information gets mixed in with its source, then, as with sound waves, you get a feedback effect--an effect of interference and uncertainty. When demand is maximal it short-circuits the initial situation and produces an uncontrollable response effect."
Take note of his earlier 3 hypothesis.

"...that that revolution had to be lent credibility by an extra dose of dead bodies." The author uses a series of synonyms and comic strips to better illustrate the visual he sees in the current state of affairs.
"Excess itself engenders the parody which invalidates the facts. And, just as the principle of economics is wrecked by financial speculation, so the principle of politics (le politique) and history is wrecked by media speculation."

"...that entire peoples are coming out of their darkness, even if it was violent and tyrannical, to fall prey to the Enlightenment, to go down like flies in the artificial light of our freedom, our unbounded solidarity, our unscrupulous news system. We who so respect the private life of individuals should also respect that of peoples and their right--against all international morality--to escape this modern tribunal of news and information-gathering which is assuming all the features of an inquisition." (Voila la solde finale!)