In novels like Sentimental Education and Bouvard and Pécuchet, and in his comic inventory of clichés and repeated ideas, Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues, the great 19th century French writer Gustave Flaubert made fun of 18th and 19th century attempts to catalogue, classify, list, and record all of scientific and historical knowledge. To what extent is Wikipedia an unaware continuation of the “Enlightenment” projects that Flaubert so brilliantly mocked? What alternative kinds of repositories of knowledge, science, and history – especially ones based in the potentials of contemporary “New Media” and “New Technology” – would consciously take into account Flaubert’s correct critique and meet with his approval? I will also consider the question of how the structure of the database as technological artefact will be upgraded by the New Computer Science to a relationship of pattern, similarity, or resonance to the experience that the user can have in a media-software environment or “game” that gathers its information from the to-be-extended more dynamic Database Structure 2.0.
Gustave Flaubert, Dictionary of Received Ideas
Wikipedia provides intelligence, but it doesn’t provide intelligence about stupidity.
Advertising – Large fortunes are made by it.
Book – Always too long, regardless of subject.
Buying and Selling – The goal of life.
Celebrities – Concern yourself about the least details of their private lives, so that you can run them down.
Chateaubriand – Best known for the cut of meat that bears his name.
Chiaroscuro – Meaning unknown.
Darwin – The fellow who says we’re sprung from monkeys.
Diderot – Always followed by “d’Alembert”
Divorce – “If Napoleon had not divorced Josephine, he would still be on the throne.”
Dreams (Vague) – Any great ideas one does not understand.
Engineering – The finest career for a young man; he learns all the sciences.
Gaming – Wax indignant at this fatal passion.
God – Voltaire himself admitted it: “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”
Hugo, Victor – “Made a sad mistake, really, when he entered politics.”
Idealism – “The best of the philosophic systems.”
Idiots – Those who differ with you.
Iliad – Always followed by “Odyssey.”
Imagination – Always “lively.” Be on guard against it. When lacking in oneself, attack it in others. To write a novel, all you need is imagination.
Innate Ideas – Make fun of them.
La Fontaine – Maintain that you have never read his Tales. Call him “the good La Fontaine,” “the immortal maker of fables.”
Machiavelli – Though you have not read him, consider him a soundrel.
Machiavellian – Word only to be spoken with a shudder.
Philosophy – Always snicker at it.
Science – “A little science takes your religion from you; a great deal brings you back to it.”
Wealth – Substitute for everything, including reputation.
Jean Baudrillard
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Era | 20th / 21st-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Baudrillard did not consider himself to be a philosopher.
Post-Structuralism · Marxism · Post-Marxism Baudrillard did not consider himself to a post-structuralist, a Marxist, or a post-Marxist. |
| Main interests | Postmodernity · Mass Media |
| Baudrillard intensely disliked the term postmodernism.
Jean Baudrillard (27 July 1929 – 6 March 2007) (IPA: [ʒɑ̃ bo.dʁi.jaʁ])[2] was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism. Baudrillard disliked sociology and was skeptical towards the concept of politics. He did not consider himself to be a sociologist, a philosopher, a cultural theorist, or a political commentator. The label of photographer perhaps makes sense. He denounced postmodernism and had nothing to do with post-structuralism. |
