Recent content by k-punk

I read the article quite quickly. My impression was that it's not a critical piece, it just explains how and why Baudrillard introduced particular scientific concepts into his work.

The three terms Mr Tea uses - 'power', 'energy' and 'force' - are hardly exclusive to science. Is he really asserting that there is no acceptable or rigorous uses of the word 'power', 'energy' and 'force' in terms of social analysis? Look, no-one has established that Baudrillard used terms from...

There's a piece on Baudrillard (and others) use of science here: http://indolentdandy.net/phd/approp.pdf

I would start with Simulations and Simulacra - a series of short essays from the 1970s (it's the one that they use in The Matrix). This contains his reflections on advertising, Apocalypse Now, science fiction (there are two essays, one on SF in general, including reflections on Dick, and one...

No, it really doesn't. It just means, 'designed to elicit a response'. Yes I can (see below). But even if I couldn't, it wouldn't mean it was nonsense; it could well be that I didn't undersand it because I lack the relevant grounding. If I were presented with something from a physics journal...

Well said, JD.

gut feeling? Saying it's a provocation doesn't, evidently, mean that it's 'meaningless, or annoying' - I meant it's a provocation to thought, to think differently... What I meant was, he needs to say why it is meaningless from a scientific point of view, not simply that assert that it is...

That's the trouble with using terms in an inaccurate way, though, isn't it....

Why is it being judged as if it were a scientific statement? It isn't - it's a proposition, a provocation. The clue that this is not hard science is the word 'perhaps'.... What does 'meaningless from a scientific point of view' mean? Are we told why or how it is meaningless? No. A bald...

Have you read Irigaray on 'The Mechanics of Fluids' or have you just read Dawkins' braying account of someone else's denunciation of it? Her writing is allusive and literary - it isn't easily boiled down to soundbites. Irigaray doesn't think that anything is 'inherently' masculine or...

To say that the claim mustn't be taken literally doesn't entail that it be taken metaphorically. If anything the Gulf War is a metonym - i.e. it isn't an image of what he is talking about, it is part of what he is talking about. And I'm afraid that many of those academics were too witless to...

In the first case, something happened, but was it really a 'match'? And if someone actually loses on purpose, we are surely not witnessing a match at all - what we are seeing is a simulation, precisely.