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In contrast, Baudrillard’s ideal technocratic supremacy seems limpid and clean. Though he does not criticize it, he remains keenly aware of the new and more virulent forms of colonialism Ecopolitics 26 that are engendered in the realm of technology. ” Maps and territory that constitute for living subjects spaces that are lived, felt, smelled, and seen give way to images convoked by means of the GPS, the Global Positioning System. The sovereign difference between maps that reflect a lived experience and simulators may be found in the vacant areas where the charm of cartographical abstraction has disappeared.

Every order is but a temporary configuration coming out of disorder that is forever off balance. In arguing for a corrective catastrophe (it matters little who or what will suffer), Baudrillard belittles those whom he may wrongly believe to be still advocating mechanics of homeostatic equilibrium. ). He shows no interest in analyzing how the latter could help slow down what is at the basis of his simulation model—that is, unbridled capital development. Celebrating the “inhuman,” a “viral” or “epidemic” phase—which, in view of the world-wide problem with AIDS, is equally related to ecological problems,15 takes on a more than cynical ring—Baudrillard ridicules “conviviality” as whatever has naive implications of sociality.

In each book, the Marx of the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and the pages of the A second type of disparagement 25 first volume of Capital (1867) on the fetishism of objects, are used to launch a caustic critique of economic development in the postwar years. By the 1980s, the cutting edge of Baudrillard’s politics begins to wear, and by 1990 it is completely dull. “Precession of simulacra” is a text both brilliant and disquieting for its rampant cynicism. Baudrillard questions less commodity-fetishism than the distinction between subject and object (Baudrillard 1981).