Category: Thinkers

  • The Third Order of Simulacra: Simulation and Hyperreality

    The third order of simulacra in Baudrillard’s genealogy is also known as simulation: the system of objects, the consumer society, the system of models and series, simulated differences generated by “the code,” the post-World War II era of media, shopping mall architectures, and the American way of life.

  • The Controversy Around Baudrillard

    Baudrillard is highly controversial as a thinker. His work has had as many detractors as it has had enthusiasts. Some of his critics absurdly even accused him of celebrating the postmodern media-cultural condition of simulacra and semiotic signs becoming increasingly autonomous and detached from the “referents” of which they were supposed to be the representations.

  • Early Baudrillard

    The postmodern recombinant culture of cyber-commodities is a system of simulated differences or differences-in-sameness. The sign-object takes on its meaning in a system of marginal or minimal differences from other sign-objects, according to a code of hierarchical significations (Coke and Pepsi, McDonalds and Burger King, the subset of formula-generated episodes of a TV series).

  • Fiction, Power, and Codes in Hyper-Modernism

    The most significant facet for my perspective is that, in hyper-modernism, the power and control exercised via narratives and fictions in the media-technological society now get implemented on much more detailed micro-levels via algorithmic-informatic codes and digital, virtual, and cybernetic technologies.

  • Claus Pias on First-Order Cybernetics

    The complete transactions of the Macys Conferences on Cybernetics, held between 1946 and 1953, were recently (2015) edited by Claus Pias and published in English and German. Pias discusses the importance of first-order cybernetics in the post-Second World War history of ideas in his introductory essay “The Age of Cybernetics.”

  • Bernhard Dotzler on Second-Order Cybernetics

    In his major three-volume work Diskurs und Medium, Bernhard J. Dotzler considers discourse and medium as embodied knowledge or thinking, examining “archaeologically” the interconnections between technology and the history of ideas.

  • Hayles on Writing and Software Code

    In Does Writing Have a Future?, Vilém Flusser lays out an intellectual project of connecting the future of software code with the history of writing. The code of the future will become more like the writing of the past – or rather, in the future there will be an as-yet-concealed hybrid of code and writing.

  • Is Trump a Fascist or is He the Parody of Fascism?

    This is the text of my speech at the virtual conference “Trump, Television and the Media: From Drama to Fake News to Tweetstorms” organized by London Metropolitan University which took place on 30-31 October 2020.

  • Baudrillard and the Situationists, by Alan N. Shapiro

    What are the similarities and differences between the Situationist theory of hyper-capitalism and consumerist media culture – the theory of “the society of the spectacle” – and Jean Baudrillard’s theory of image, media and consumer culture – the theory of simulation, simulacra, virtuality, hyper-reality, Integral Reality, and “the models and codes precede the real”?

  • Philosophie, Science und Ökologie: Whitehead und Merleau-Ponty über den Begriff der Natur, von Alan N. Shapiro

    Vor etwa zehn Jahren begann ich mich intensiv für Kunstwerke und Kunstinstallationen zu interessieren, die Wissenschaften und Technologien in ihrer Konzeption und Ausführung mit einbezogen: Medienkunst, Electronic Art, Computerkunst, Videokunst, Bio Art, transgenic art, robotics art, telepresence art, ecosystems art und virtuelle Kunst.

  • Alan N. Shapiro racconta “Star Trek” (RAI4 Italian TV interview)

    This is the transcript of an interview about Star Trek which I did on Italian TV (RAI4) a few years ago. If I can find the time, I will translate it soon into English. There exist also transcripts of interviews which I did on Italian TV about Lost and The Prisoner.

  • Orwell, Baudrillard and Trump, by Alan N. Shapiro

    Trump makes statements which are not true, but which he claims to be true. His inauguration crowd on January 20th, 2017 was huge, he says. Millions of people voted illegally in the presidential election, especially in California and New Hampshire, he declares. President Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, Trump states.

  • Baudrillard und Trump: Agonie des Realen, von Alan N. Shapiro

    Sollen wir uns mit Orwells Medientheorie bescheiden oder der von Baudrillard? Oder brauchen wir eine neue Medientheorie? Trump behauptet Dinge, die nicht wahr sind, die er jedoch für wahr erklärt. Er sagt, die Menschenmenge am Tag seiner Amtseinführung am 20. Januar 2017 war gigantisch. Millionen Leute haben illegalerweise bei den Präsidentschaftswahlen abgestimmt, verkündet er.

  • Baudrillard und Trump: Simulation und Objektorientierung, nicht wahr und falsch, von Alan N. Shapiro

    All das mag tatächlich wahr sein, es hinterlässt jedoch nicht den Hauch eines Eindrucks bei seinen Anhängern. Überall in seinen Arbeiten kommentiert Baudrillard den Unterschied zwischen dem Diskurs der Kritischen Theorie (liberale Journalisten wie Sargent sind, was Trump betrifft, darin stecken geblieben) und dem, was er selbst als “fatale Theorie” bezeichnet.

  • Baudrillard and Trump: Simulation and Object-Orientation, Not True and False by Alan N. Shapiro

    I feel very privileged that, in Volume Six, Number One (January 2009) of the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (IJBS), my essay on Baudrillard’s America appears in tandem with Gerry Coulter’s essay on America. Gerry’s text is extremely helpful in thinking about the contemporary phenomenon of Donald John Trump.