Self-referential signs: "Why is there nothing rather than something?"

Thinking about Baudrillard...

Excess.
Greed.
Aggression.
Arguments of dissassociation.
The errosion of meaning via its excesses.
Gift exchange versus sign and commodity exchange.
The object and its power to seduce.
The Capatalistic implosion due to a lack of symbolic exchange values-attacks itself: the twin towers being, as it were, 'brought down by their own weight' — forced into destruction by the society that created them.


* the era of the original
* to the counterfeit
* to the produced, mechanical copy, and through
* to the simulated "third order of simulacra" whereby the copy has come to replace the original.

"Baudrillard is not disputing the trivial issue that reason remains operative in some actions, that if I want to arrive at the next block, for example, I can assume a Newtonian universe (common sense), plan a course of action (to walk straight for X meters, carry out the action, and finally fulfil my goal by arriving at the point in question). What is in doubt is that this sort of thinking enables a historically informed grasp of the present in general. According to Baudrillard, it does not. The concurrent spread of the hyperreal through the media and the collapse of liberal and Marxist politics as the master narratives, deprives the rational subject of its privileged access to truth. In an important sense individuals are no longer citizens, eager to maximise their civil rights, nor proletarians, anticipating the onset of communism. They are rather consumers, and hence the prey of objects as defined by the code." Poster


'...imaginary as virtual reality, a vast "reality show" where reality itself becomes a spectacle [vient se donner en spectacle], where the real becomes a theme park...After the prostitution of the imaginary, here is now the hallucination of the real in its ideal and simplified version...There is no reason why Disney would not take over the human genome, which, by the way, is already being resequenced, to turn it into a genetic show...
Meanwhile, from the bottom of his nitrogen solution he [walt] continues to colonize the world - both the imaginary and the real - in the spectral universe of virtual reality, inside which we all have become extras [figurants].' B on "Disney world company".