{"id":25355,"date":"2024-12-15T13:16:24","date_gmt":"2024-12-15T13:16:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/?p=25355"},"modified":"2024-12-18T11:29:34","modified_gmt":"2024-12-18T11:29:34","slug":"philosophy-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/?p=25355","title":{"rendered":"PHiLOSOPHY & POLiTiCS:"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Hmmm!?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve never really like the whole French (& NW European?) Postmodernist \u2018school\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was subjected to three years of it at Goldsmiths College, at what was a nadir of my own life, as I exited my teens and embarked on \u2018adult life\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baudrillard was a big part of it, along with Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, et al. I found it all profoundly depressing and unhelpful. And, by and large, I still do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Courting controversy?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Ok, they did\/do have some insights. We\u2019ll come to some of those in dew coarse. But it\u2019s frequently attached to a lot of extremely foetid \u2018thinking\u2019, which I\u2019ve always reacted against, and still do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The solipsistic primacy of language in postmodernism has always been an issue for me. It\u2019s a kind of academics disappearing up their own arse line of \u2018philosophy\u2019, as far as I\u2019m concerned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps Baudrillard is dead right? But in a very specific way\/context? If by \u2018we are all Buster Keaton\u2019s\u2019 he\u2019s referring to all humanity, I think he\u2019s fundamentally and profoundly wrong in his conclusion. But I\u2019ll come back to this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If, on the other hand, he means a certain type of professional<\/em> intellectual, such as writers, or particularly a certain quite specific type of academics<\/em>? Well, he might be on to something there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I had this edition of Barthes\u2019 Mythologies.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve never liked the language of postmodernism, with its signs, signifiers, tropes, simulacra, and whatnot. It can all – or some of it – be read and understood, or decoded. But there\u2019s an awful lot of wordy guff that tends toward confusion and opacity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have, in truth, no idea whatsoever, what the impact of what we currently call AI will actually evolve into. Most of the discussion around it I find so vexing I simply don\u2019t want to get embroiled. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ll give a couple of examples from my own personal human interaction side of life. First, there\u2019s a guy I know who works in music education who boasts that AI is a great tool for all sorts of reasons, but most often\/loudly, the marking of students work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second, there\u2019s a family member, of sorts, who uses AI, mostly covertly, but also openly, to create poetry. I have what I believe are fundamental issues with both of these scenarios.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe in time my position on all this will change? I\u2019m a firm believer in Evolution! Both as a process that shapes the development of biological life, and as a way to develop personally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, at present, I believe that marking essays and writing poetry are skills to be acquired, practiced and developed. Delegating these activities to computers running AI is something else. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Buster Keaton.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Returning to a line of thought broached earlier; if Baudrillard means we\u2019re all<\/em> clowns, or fools? Well, surely that is as true before<\/em> AI (whatever that is) as after. But he clearly doesn\u2019t mean that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s my view that Baudrillard and his ilk are – or aspire to be, in certain respects – Punk. Enfant Terribles<\/em>. But armed with a library of polysyllabic thesaurarii, as opposed to snot and distorted guitars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His series of essays on the Gulf War – written before during and after, and called Won\u2019t<\/em>\/Isn\u2019t<\/em>\/Didn\u2019t<\/em> – are titled like high-fallutin\u2019 click-bait. He can\u2019t possibly mean that, can he?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And of course he thereby cleverly draws the potential reader in, before – like a punk magician – stunning us with his intellectual sleight of word. And here we come to what these folk might<\/em> be getting right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the modern world, especially the online world – saturated as it is with imagery and words, reality (or at least certain views on reality) gets harder and harder to discern. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baudrillard argued that the Gulf War wasn\u2019t a war – not in the old-fashioned Battle of Waterloo vein – but an atrocity, falsely sold to the domestic audience (and the rest of the world) as \u2018war\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of this is actually generally and genuinely interesting. Why did\/do we really<\/em> go to war? What actually<\/em> constitutes war? And so on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This kind of AI \u2018content\u2019 is flooding the web.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

My own gut feeling, in relation to AI and the future of human thought (be it generally, or as an academic profession) is that as AI evolves – and certainly in light of developments so far – it is already adding to our difficulties in discerning what is real. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Will or should AI replace human thinking? It shouldn\u2019t, in my view. But that doesn\u2019t mean it won\u2019t. We\u2019ve already seen numerous human inventions overtake and virtually enslave us. Agriculture, for starters. And more recently\/perniciously, money, for example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baudrillard is widely regarded as a pessimist or nihilist. I don\u2019t want to be either. But I fear I may be both. So might it be that whilst I really dislike Baudrillard and Postmodernism, I might have to concede that he might – as much as I want him to be wrong – actually be right? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do hope not!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve never really like the whole French (& NW European?) Postmodernist \u2018school\u2019. I was subjected to three years of it at Goldsmiths College, at what was a nadir of my own life, as I exited my teens and embarked on \u2018adult life\u2019. Baudrillard was a big part of it, along with Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, … <\/p>\n

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