Banality is a theme Baudrillard returns to again and again in his writings and interviews. It is for him quite simply an inevitable product of modernity - everywhere modernity spreads, banality follows. “The desertifiation of signs and men” is a phrase that appears in one of Baudrillard’s most celebrated books,
Maybe I'm out of my depth, but do you think people can even survive without certainty/a narrative? Isn't that what makes the world intelligible in the first place? Without "what for?" the "what?" becomes just white noise - a bunch of trivia and factoids with no possible interpretation. Even the bodily senses of the world only have meaning through the evolutionary "telos" of survival of the fittest via trial-and-error, whether consciously recognized as such or not. Eg. a rabbit might not be conscious of this telos, but its smell, vision, hearing, interpretation, ie its entire phenomenology, is determined by this telos. Functionally, a "what for?" is inherently built into all of us from the ground up. And all this entirely within the empirical, scientific, kantian phenomenal realm.
So, in all this uncertainty, must there be and is there somewhere a backstop of intelligiblity, a narrative?
First of all, thanks very much for reading. In that essay, what I suggest is that we embrace uncertainty as something simply unavoidable in the 21st century. Looking at our situation as lucidly as possible, in the post-postmodern era or however we want to define it, there is simply nothing left anymore that can be treated as a certainty. This isn’t to say we should ‘fly blind’—we can and should develop working hypotheses as to our predicament, the meaning (if any) of existence, history etc. But I don’t think we need any longer that belief that life has a fixed and definite meaning. We can move on from that kind of religiosity.
On Twitter I’ve posted a bit recently on non-theism, which ties in with this idea of the uncertainty revolution. Non-theism does not say that nothing remotely like God exists. It rather asserts the inadequacy of the deity concept. I’m suggesting that whatever the ‘theological’ truth may be, it may make more sense for us to assume it to be inconceivable and ungraspable. At any rate, it is an avenue to explore.
Makes me wonder how doable it is to embrace uncertainty. Looking at the atheist era, it seems science overtook some of the religiosity. In any case, the uncertainty now is nothing compared to what's to come with AI generated realities. Gonna be an interesting spectacle.
Maybe I'm out of my depth, but do you think people can even survive without certainty/a narrative? Isn't that what makes the world intelligible in the first place? Without "what for?" the "what?" becomes just white noise - a bunch of trivia and factoids with no possible interpretation. Even the bodily senses of the world only have meaning through the evolutionary "telos" of survival of the fittest via trial-and-error, whether consciously recognized as such or not. Eg. a rabbit might not be conscious of this telos, but its smell, vision, hearing, interpretation, ie its entire phenomenology, is determined by this telos. Functionally, a "what for?" is inherently built into all of us from the ground up. And all this entirely within the empirical, scientific, kantian phenomenal realm.
So, in all this uncertainty, must there be and is there somewhere a backstop of intelligiblity, a narrative?
First of all, thanks very much for reading. In that essay, what I suggest is that we embrace uncertainty as something simply unavoidable in the 21st century. Looking at our situation as lucidly as possible, in the post-postmodern era or however we want to define it, there is simply nothing left anymore that can be treated as a certainty. This isn’t to say we should ‘fly blind’—we can and should develop working hypotheses as to our predicament, the meaning (if any) of existence, history etc. But I don’t think we need any longer that belief that life has a fixed and definite meaning. We can move on from that kind of religiosity.
On Twitter I’ve posted a bit recently on non-theism, which ties in with this idea of the uncertainty revolution. Non-theism does not say that nothing remotely like God exists. It rather asserts the inadequacy of the deity concept. I’m suggesting that whatever the ‘theological’ truth may be, it may make more sense for us to assume it to be inconceivable and ungraspable. At any rate, it is an avenue to explore.
Makes me wonder how doable it is to embrace uncertainty. Looking at the atheist era, it seems science overtook some of the religiosity. In any case, the uncertainty now is nothing compared to what's to come with AI generated realities. Gonna be an interesting spectacle.