What would have Baudrillard said about this?
Is this an example of a fourth order simulacrum? Or to be more precise of a fractal object?
>>7820004
How is this a simulacrum? Trump exists
>>7820040
He a media generated personality, he doesn't "exist" in the normal sense of the word. "Trump" the persona is a simulacrum.
>>7820052
Yes but Trump exists
If anything he's a 3rd order simulation
>>7820052
You don't know what a simulacrum is. A simulacrum is a simulation of something which never existed. You can say Trump's personality is media generated but Trump, the person, exists. Therefor this media created image of Trump is a simulation.
>>7820071
>>7820076
Perhaps I was being a bit unclear, I was talking about the tweet he made as a fourth order simulacrum.
The situation being this , that a constructed media man would actually enter politics and then tweet a meme about "him". The whole situation has some sense of infernal irony to it, as well as ambiguity.
So my point would be could we take this ambiguous `digital artifact which is his tweet as fourth order simulacrum. A fractal that mirrors back at us a certain uneasy hyperreality and in a sense the social fact that internet memes are a form of fourth order simulacra entering the political field, destroying older media perceptions of reality and introducing new ones.
Duuuuuude, so deep and meta. Fuckin' mind blown. Getting the bong out for this thread. There are like so many different perspectives of the same thing. I mean, what is a "thing"? Just think: there is the actual person (Do atoms even exist?) then there is like the REPRESENTATION of that person too. Like holograms, holograms that interact with holograms of holograms forever like two mirrors facing each other. Wow!!!
>>7820111
/lit/'s tiny as shit and yet you still suck at trying to be a queen
>>7820102
I thought you were talking about the blurred line between reality star and legitimate presidential candidate
Yeah I would say that as a fourth order simulation that refers to no reality, that tweet is a pretty good example. Does it matter if he's aware of the original meaning of the meme?
Let me be more specific:
"Let me introduce a new particle into the microphysics of simulacra For after the natural, commodity and structural stage of value come the fractal stage...At the fourth, the fractal (or viral, or radiant) stage of value, there is no point of reference at all, and value radiates in all directions, occupying all interstices, without reference to anything whatsoever by virtue of pure contiguity. At the fractal stage there is no longer any equivalence, whether natural or general. Properly speaking there is now no law of value merely a sort of epidemic of value, a sort of a general metastasis of value, a haphazard proliferation of value. Indeed, we should no longer speak of any value at all, for this kind of propagation or chain reaction makes all valuation impossible." (Jean Baudrillard, Transparency of Evil, p.5;13)
The tweet or meme made itself would be a kind of an example of this viral proliferation f value, since it propped up by nothing other than hyperreality, thus it mirrors back at us the social body, like a fractal or crystal.
Even "Feel the Bern," would be applicable.
What are these two phrases implying? What do they mean? To the general mass, just a very basic understanding of their sought after candidate.
>>7820121
Yes, but the problem would be what if Trump didn't make the that tweet, and it was just an image posted only on 4chan, Twitter, Facebook etc.?
If that was the case it would be a merely third order simulacrum because it's just part of the hyperreal media. But my argument would be that the tweet itself made by Trump is a form of new media of a fourth order of simulation.
Trump the media "meme" tweets a meme about himself being a meme. That artifact by itself is completely non-value dependant. It exists as an artifact by it's own accord.
Yes, Trump represents very well the fractal stage of value. Take for example the people who support him "ironically," and the people voting for him out of protest although they hate him. Trump exhibits another hallmark of the fourth stage, a viral challenge to the system that arises within it.
>Hey /lit/ what about thing I now hardly have a cursory knowledge of thanks to grinding wikipedia articles but in the interrogative so it might look like the basis of a thread? Also too clever by half observation.
Donald Trump is Baudrillard's wet dream.
>>7820111
Why do you need to try so hard on this post of all things, just pick up a book and read it you fraud
>>7820686
Was thinking the same thing
OP doesn't know what he's talking about
>>7820102
That still doesn't make it a simulacrum
Please, read the fucking book. Don't just skim the wiki page.
Internet memes are no more of a simulation than older types of media. It's someone using their perspective of the original source image and molding that image into something new. The original image is still there.
>>7821542
A picture of pepe is not a fourth-order simulacrum, dude. You've completely lost the picture of what Baudrillard is doing. Even if you correctly understood what he meant by the orders of simulacra, it's not fruitful to put images in little boxes. If you really want to theorize on Trump from a Baudrillardian perspective, you need to take theory to its limits. Theory for Baudrillard must always anticipate and precede the state of things, act as a gamble, a fatal strategy. Only by risking everything can the theorist risk nothing. His writing on simulacra is almost 40 years old now. To regurgitate his categories decades later is to defeat the purpose of his project.
>>7821550
I think he would hate to see his theories represented by a right-wing populist.
Remember he was a commie, he wrote everything to advance the cause of the communist revolution, not to have memes and culture jamming practices hijacked by racists and reactionaries.
>>7824119
Baudrillard took his leave of Communism early in his career. He wrote an entire book (The Mirror of Production) about how Communism could only reproduce the structures of capitalism because it assumed the premises of capital. Saying "he wrote everything to advance the cause of the communist revolution" is just the kind of totally uniformed bullshit that comes up in every thread about Baudrillard, or really every thread on /lit/ ever.
>>7820102
What is infernal irony? I need to know for a project.
>>7824216
Doesn't mean anything in a Baudrillardian context.
