And that smile everyone gives you as they pass, that friendly contraction of the jaws triggered by human warmth. It is the eternal smile of communication, the smile through which the child becomes aware of the presence of the others. It is the equivalent of the primal scream of man alone in the world….
NEW YORK The beauty of the Black and Puerto Rican women of New York. Apart from the sexual stimulation produced by the crowding together of so many races, it must be said that black, the pigmentation of the dark races, is like a natural make-up that is set off by the artificial kind to…
These lines, quoted from America, by Jean Baudrillard, published 1986, translated by Chris Turner: NEW YORK More sirens here, day and night. The cars are faster, the advertisements more aggressive. This is wall-to-wall prostitution. And total electric light too. And the game – all games – gets more intense. It’s always like this when…
It is Sunday morning, the 21st day of June. Father’s Day. I know little about the role and responsibility of being a Father. Plainly fatherhood is more than a biological or a social role. I’ve known many males, with children, who qualify for the label, since language is a social construct. When the topic…
And we are all melancholic. Melancholia is the brutal disaffection that characterizes our saturated systems. Once the hope of balancing good and evil, true and false, indeed of confronting some values of the same order, once the more general hope of a relation of forces and a stake has vanished. Everywhere, always, the system…
All around us are nothingbut dummies of power,but the mechanical illusion of powerstill rules the social order,behind which grows the absent, illegible, terror of control, of which we are the minuscule terminals. The whole logical universe of the politicalis dissolved at the same time,ceding its place to a transfinite universe of simulationwhere from the…
The love of money as a possession—- as distinguished from the love of money as a means to enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease….
I am tired of writing about the bully that we’ve installed in the White House. It’s only by means of words that his dissimulation can be revealed to be darkness, a grim future which his lies hold for all of us. I’ll continue to have my say until he and his supporters are out…
How about a fist in the face! A friend recently relayed the story of a family member who works in retail. The point of his tale was the cascade of anti-social, loutish behavior suffered by a seasoned retail employee dedicated to helping customers, that was told to him. The disconcerting behavior took place during…
Socialization is measured by the exposure to media messages. Whoever is underexposed to media is de-socialized or virtually asocial. Everywhere information is thought to produce an accelerated circulation of meaning, a plus value of meaning corresponding to the economic one that results from the accelerated rotation of capital. Information is thought to create…
