Summary
Contents
Subject index
This insightful book is the first to critically examine the ideas of some of the key thinkers of simulation. It addresses the work of Baudrillard, Debord, Virilio and Eco, clarifying their arguments by referring to the intellectual and social worlds each emerged from distilling what is important from their discussions. The book argues for a critical and selective use of the concept of simulation. Like the idea of ideology, simulation is a political theory, but it has also become a deeply pessimistic theory of the end of history and the impossibility of positive change. Through a series of reflections on the meaning of theme parks, warfare and computer modelling, Sean Cubitt demonstrates the strengths and limitations of the simulation thesis
Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will
Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will
The history of intellectual engagement with the everyday culture of the last hundred and fifty years has not been a happy one. Pretty much since the dawn of mass media, mass urbanisation, mass migration and mass production, cultural critics have been largely overcome by pessimism. Eco's apocalyptic intelligentsia have staked their claim from Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy in 1869 to the panic society of virtual capitalism in Arthur Kroker's aphoristic postmodernism (for example, Kroker and Kroker 1996; Kroker and Weinstein 1994). From the right-wing Ortega y Gassett, from the left-wing Theodor Adorno, and from the liberal centre-ground Jacques Ellul and Neil Postman, intellectuals have marked the period since the ...
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