1,180 definitions
911 (n.) is pure spectacle: The terrorist violence is not 'real'. In a sense, it is worse: It is symbolic. The event's reality has absorbed fiction's energy, and has itself become fiction.
911 (n.) is the clash of triumphant globalization at war with itself.
America (n.) is, in concrete form, the traumatic consequence of european dreams and the weightless paradise of liberation from the past. What is only thought in europe becomes reality in America. Americans are not interested in conceptualizing reality but in materializing ideas.
America (n.) is utopia achieved is a phrase which, rather than endorsing the USA, emphasizes that America represents an unassimilable otherness to european notions of history and progress.
Art (n.) is no longer anything more than a kind of meta-language for banality.
Artificial intelligence (n.) is wrongheaded in that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.
The Body (n.) is a sanctuary for psychic energy and drives, primary processes, it is an anti-body, the ultimate revolutionary referent.
Capitalism (n.) dominates more through the production and consumption of meaning than through economic production.
The City (n.) is concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exist and you are always in the same one. It's the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.
The City (n.) is distinguished by the catastrophic forms it presupposes and which are a vital part of its essential charm. New york is king kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering inferno. Los angeles is the horizontal fault, california breaking off and sliding into the pacific: Earthquake.
The City (n.) , in years to come, will stretch out horizontally and will be non-urban (a la Los Angeles). After that, it will bury itself in the ground and will no longer have a name. Everything will become infrastructure bathed in artificial light and energy. The brilliant superstructure, the crazy verticality will have disappeared.
Consumption (n.) is a kind of hysterical flight driven by an insatiable sense of 'lack.
Consumption (n.) is a power strategy. It is not the things themselves that are consumed, but the status value that is ascribed to them when they are made into symbols.
Consumption (n.) is a systematic and total idealist practice, which far exceeds our relations to objects and relations among individuals, one that extens to all manifestations (registres) of history, communication and culture.
Consumption (n.) is an active, collective behavior: It is something enforced, a morality, an institution. It is a whole system of values, with all that expression implies in terms of group integration and social control functions.
Consumption (n.) is an organized control of sign and one of the many ways any subject is assimilated in any given society. For baudrillard the logic of consumption is based on social differentiation. By the logic of social differentiation, individuals distinguish themselves and obtain social prestige and standing through the purchase and use of consumer goods.
Culture (n.) is a site of the secret, of seduction, of initiation, of a restrained and a highly ritualized symbolic exchange.
Deterrence of the real by the virtual (n.) is the idea that the virtual threat of the west's military superiority decreases the possibility of armed conflict.