Music Banter - Most intelligent things ever said by anyone! (wtf?)

"Nothing meaningful can be expressed on a bumper sticker." - Bumper Sticker

" If I had to characterize the current state of affairs, I would say that it is "after the orgy." The orgy, in a way, was the explosive move*ment of modernity, of liberation in every domain. Political liberation, sexual liberation, liberation of productive forces, libera*tion of destructive forces, women's liberation, children's liberation, liberation of unconscious drives, liberation of art. The assumption of all models of representation, all models of anti-representation; It was a total orgy: of reality, rationality, sexuality, critique and anti-critique, growth and growth crises. We have explored all the paths of production and virtual overproduction of objects, signs, messages, ideologies, pleasures. Today, if you want my opinion, everything has been liberated, the dice have been rolled, and we are collectively faced with the crucial question: WHAT DO WE DO AFTER THE ORGY?
We can only simulate orgy and liberation now, pretending to continue on in the same direction at greater speeds, but in reality, we are accelerating in empty space, because all of the ends of lib*eration (of production, progress, revolution) are already behind us. What we are haunted by, obsessed with, is the anticipation of every result, the availability of every sign, every form, every desire, since everything is already liberated. What to do? It is the state of simulation where we can only replay all the scenarios because they have already taken place – in reality or virtually, it is the state of accomplished utopia, of every utopia accomplished, but where you have to live paradoxically as if they had not. Because they have been realized, and because we can no longer keep the hope of accomplishing them, we are only left with hyper-accomplishment in indefinite simulation. We are living in the infinite reproduction of ideals, fantasies, images and dreams that are now behind us and that we have to reproduce in a kind of fatal indifference.
This is true of every domain: the grand social utopia was accomplished in the bureaucratic and totalitarian materialization of the social. The grand sexual utopia was accomplished in the technological, athletic and neurotic materialization of every sex*ual practice. And this is true of art as well: the grand utopia of art, the great illusion, the great transcendence of art materialized everywhere. Art has thoroughly entered reality. Some say that art is dematerializing. The exact opposite is true: art today has thor*oughly entered reality. It is in museums and galleries, but also in trash, on walls, in the street, in the banality of everything that has been made sacred today without any further debate. The aes*theticization of the world is complete. Just as we now have a bureaucratic materialization of the social, a technological materi*alization of sexuality, a media and advertising materialization of politics, we have a semiotic materialization of art. It is culture understood as the officialization of every thing in terms of signs and the circulation of signs. There are complaints about the com*mercialization of art, the mercantilization of aesthetic values. But this is just the old nostalgic, bourgeois refrain. The general aes*theticization of things should be feared more. Much more than market speculation, we should fear the transcription of every thing in cultural, aesthetic terms, into museographic signs. That is culture, that is our dominant culture: the vast enterprise of museographic reproduction of reality, the vast enterprise of aes*thetic storage, re-simulation and aesthetic reprinting of all the forms that surround us. That is the greatest threat. I call it the DEGREE XEROX OF CULTURE.
With this current state of things, we are no longer in the heroic turn Baudelaire wanted to give the universe of commodity by means of art, we are only giving the world as it is a sentimental and aesthetic turn like the one Baudelaire decried in advertising. And art has become that for the most part: a prosthesis of advertising; and culture, a generalized prosthesis. Instead of the triumphant simulation envisaged by Baudelaire, we only have a depressing, repetitive simulation. An has always been a simulacrum, but a sim*ulacrum that had the power of illusion. Our simulation is something different; it only exists in the sentimental vertigo of models. Art was a dramatic simulacrum where the reality of the world and illusion were in play. It is only an aesthetic prosthesis now. And when I say prosthesis, I am not thinking of an artificial leg. I mean those other, more dangerous prostheses, the chemical, hormonal and genetic ones that are like somatic Xeroxes, literal reproductions that engender the body, that engender it following a process of total simulation, behind which the body has disap*peared. Just as people. once said that glasses would become total, integrated prostheses for species that had lost its sight, culture and art are the total prostheses of a world that has lost the magic of form and appearance.
I have said that the sublime of modern art lied in the magic of its disappearance. But the capital danger for modern art is repeating its own disappearance. All of the forms of this heroic vanishing, this heroic abnegation of form and color, of the very substance of art, have completely unfolded. Even the utopia of the disappearance of art has been accomplished. As for us, we have reached a second generation simulation, or a simulation of the third kind, if you pre*fer. We inhabit a perverse situation in which not only the utopia of art has been accomplished, since it has entered reality (in conjunc*tion with the social, political and sexual utopias), but the utopia of its disappearance has been accomplished as well. Art is therefore destined to simulate its own disappearance, since it has already taken place. We relive the disappearance of art everyday in the repetition of its forms-no matter whether figurative or abstract* just as each day we relive the disappearance of politics in the media repetition of its forms, and each day we relive the disappearance of sexuality in the pornographic and advertising repetition of its forms. It is necessary to distinguish clearly between these two moments: the moment of heroic simulacrum, so to speak, when art experiences and expresses its own disappearance, and the moment when it has to manage this disappearance as a sort of negative heritage. The first moment is original, it only happens once, even if it lasted for decades from the 19th to the 20th centuries. The second moment can last for several centuries, but it is no longer original, and I think we are involved in this second moment, in this surpassed disappearance, in this surpassed simulation, surpassed in the sense of an irreversible coma.

I will change perspective to end on a note of hope. I placed this analysis under the sign "after the orgy" – what do we do after the orgy of modernity? Is simulation all we have left? With the melan*choly nuance of the idea of a "vanishing point" and the "degree Xerox of culture"? I forgot to say that this expression – " after the orgy" – comes from a story full of hope: it is the story of a man who whispers into the ear of a woman during an orgy, "What are you doing after the orgy?" There is always the hope of a new seduction. "

-Jean Baudrillard