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  • Aberrant Architecture

    Wherever You Find People: The Radical Schools of Oscar…

  • Urs Peter Flückiger

    Wie viel Haus? Thoreau, Le Corbusier und die Sustainable…

  • Caroline A. Jones, David Mather,…

    Experience: Culture, Cognition, and the Common Sense

  • Friedrich von Borries

    Weltentwerfen. Eine politische Designtheorie

  • Douglas Crimp

    Before Pictures

  • Nina Rappaport

    Vertical Urban Factory

  • Boris Groys

    Particular Cases

  • Ana de Brea

    Total Latin American Architecture. Libretto of Modern…

  • Jaleh Mansoor

    Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and…

  • Mckenzie Wark

    Molecular Red. Theory for the Anthropocene

  • Mark Nash (Ed.)

    Red Africa. Affective Communities and the Cold War

  • Adolf Loos

    Ornament und Verbrechen

  • Thilo Hilpert

    Century of Modernity. Das Jahrhundert der Moderne.…

  • M. Fineder, T. Geisler, S. Hackenschmidt

    Nomadic Furniture 3.0: Neues befreites Wohnen? New…

  • Hannah Neate, Ruth Craggs

    Modern Futures

  • Douglas Spencer

    The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary…

  • Freek Lomme (Ed.)

    Can You Feel it? Effectuating Tactility and Print in the…

  • Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc

    State and Politics: Deleuze and Guattari on Marx

  • Christoph Keller

    Paranomia

  • Philipp Meuser

    Seismic Modernism. Architecture and Housing in Soviet…

  • Cartha

    On Relations in Architecture

  • Michaela Meise

    Eshi Addis Ababa

  • Takahiro Kurashima

    Poemotion 3

  • Han Byung-Chul

    Die Austreibung des Anderen. Gesellschaft, Wahrnehmung und…

  • Cate St Hill

    This is Temporary. How Transient Projects are Redefining…

  • Carlo Ratti, Matthew Claudel

    The City of Tomorrow: Sensors, Networks, Hackers, and the…

  • Henri Lefebvre

    Metaphilosophy

  • Eduard Helman

    Rhetoric of Logos: A Primer for Visual Language

  • Marie Neurath, Robin Kinross

    Die Transformierer. Entstehung und Prinzipien von Isotype

  • P. Lewis, M. Tsurumaki, D. J. Lewis

    Manual of Section

  • W. Nägeli, N. Kirn Tajeri (Hg.)

    Kleine Eingriffe: Neues Wohnen im Bestand der…

  • Peter Granser

    El Alto. Freddy Mamani Silvestre

  • Omar Kholeif (Ed.)

    Electronic Superhighway. From Experiments in Art and…

  • Bill Caplan

    Buildings are for People. Human Ecological Design

  • Hannah Black

    Dark Pool Party

  • R. Pasel, A. Hagner, H. Drexler, R. Boch

    Home not Shelter! Gemeinsam leben statt getrennt wohnen

  • Alessandro Biamonti

    Archiflop. A guide to the most spectacular failures in the…

  • Isabell Lorey, Gundula Ludwig, Ruth…

    Foucaults Gegenwart. Sexualität - Sorge - Revolution

  • Brigitta Kuster

    Choix d'un passé. Transnationale Vergegenwärtigungen…

  • Simon Roloff

    Der Stellenlose: Robert Walsers Poetik des Sozialstaats

  • Jace Clayton (aka DJ Rupture)

    Uproot. Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture

  • Nicolas Bourriaud

    The Exform

  • Blanco, Galan, Carrasco, Llopis, Vezier…

    After Belonging: Objects, Spaces, and Territories of the…

  • Sven Quadflieg, Gregor Theune (Eds.)

    Nadogradnje. Urban Self-Regulation in Post-Yugoslav Cities

  • Regina Bittner, Elke Krasny (Hg)

    Auf Reserve: Haushalten! Historische Modelle und aktuelle…

  • Karin Harrasser

    Prothesen. Figuren einer lädierten Moderne

  • Frieze Magazine

    frieze A to Z of Contemporary Art

  • Leonardo Finotti

    A Collection of Latin American Modern Architecture

  • Werner Sewing

    No more learning from Las Vegas. Stadt, Wohnen oder…

  • Yuk Hui

    On the Existence of Digital Objects

  • Alina Serban & Kalliopi Dimou,…

    Enchanting Views: Romanian Black Sea Tourism Planning and…

  • Andre Lepecki

    Singularities. Dance in the Age of Performance

  • M. R. Stein, L. Miller, M. Henrichs (Hg)

    Blueprint for Counter Education. Curriculum, Handbook, Eall…

  • Owen Hatherley

    The Chaplin Machine. Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist…

  • Lina Dokuzović

    Struggles for Living Learning. Within Emergent Knowledge…

  • Marcus Quent (Hg)

    Absolute Gegenwart

  • Fabian Frenzel

    Slumming It: The Tourist Valorisation of Urban Poverty

  • Keller Easterling

    Extrastatecraft. The Power of Infrastructure Space

  • Yuk Hui, Andreas Broeckmann

    30 Years after Les Immatériaux: Art, Science and Theory

  • Jacques Lucan

    Composition, Non-Composition. Architecture and Theory in…

  • Seth Price

    Fuck Seth Price (Second Edition, Hardcover)

  • J. Herzog, P. de Meuron

    Herzog de Meuron. Trügerische Transparenz. Beobachtungen…

  • Florentine Sack

    Open House 2. Gestaltungskriterien für eine neue…

  • Beti Zerovc

    When Attitudes Become the Norm: The Contemporary Curator…

  • Luca Lo Pinto, Vanessa Joan Müller (Eds…

    Frederick Kiesler. Function Follows Vision, Vision Follows…

  • Thun-Hohenstein, Bogner, Lind, Vischer…

    Friedrich Kiesler – Lebenswelten / Life Visions

  • Ruben Pater

    The Politics of Design: A (Not So) Global Manual for Visual…

  • Giovanna Silva

    Syria, A Travel Guide to Disappearance

  • Amie Siegel

    Double Negative. Ricochet 10

  • Jens Balzer

    Pop. Ein Panorama der Gegenwart

  • Timothy D. Taylor

    Music and Capitalism. A History of the Present

  • GRAFT

    Architecture Activism

  • Nav Haq (Ed.)

    RAVE. Rave and its Influence on Art and Culture

  • Trudy Nieuwenhuys, Gemeente Museum Den…

    Constant. New Babylon. To Us, Liberty

  • Borja Ballbé

    Ordinary Landscapes. Paisajes comunes

  • Riet Wijnen (Ed.)

    abstraction creation, art non figuratif 1932

  • A. Lepik, V. S. Bader (Hg)

    World of Malls. Architekturen des Konsums

  • C. Menrad, H. Creighton (Eds.)

    William Krisel's Palm Springs

  • Brandon Labelle

    Overheard and Interrupted

  • Jessica Helfand

    Design. The Invention of Desire

  • Stephen Prina

    galesburg, illinois+

  • Marc Angélil, Charlotte Malterre-…

    Housing Cairo

  • Antje Ehmann, Carles Guerra (Eds.)

    Harun Farocki. Another Kind of Empathy

  • T. J. Demos

    Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of…

  • Gloria Moure(Ed.)

    Behind the facts. Interfunktionen 1968-1975

  • Roberto Simanowski

    Facebook-Gesellschaft

  • Berliner Hefte zu Geschichte und…

    Die Mauerpark-Affäre

  • François J. Bonnet

    The Order of Sounds. A Sonorous Archipelago

  • Malzacher, Öğüt, Tan (eds.)

    The Silent University - Toward a Transversal Pedagogy

  • Markus Miessen

    Crossbenching: Toward a Proactive Mode of Participation,…

  • Francesca Balena Arista

    Poltronova Backstage: Archizoom, Sottsass and Superstudio.…

  • David Joselit

    Nach Kunst

  • Frank Berzbach

    Formbewusstsein. Eine kleine Vernetzung der alltäglichen…

  • Jacek Mrowczyk

    VeryGraphic. Polish Designers of the 20th Century

  • Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber

    Front, Field, Line, Plane. Researching the Militant Image

  • Annette Gigon, Mike Guyer, Felix…

    Residential Towers

  • 9. Berlin Biennale für zeitgenössische…

    The Present in Drag

  • Geert Lovink

    Social Media Abyss. Critical Internet Cultures and the…

Cover In the Delirium

In the Delirium of the Simulation: Baudrillard Revisited by Achim Szepanski

15 years after his death, the ghost of Jean Baudrillard lingers. Beyond just a pessimistic media theorist, the hyper-realist metaphysician of media and information may have become more relevant than ever before, and many of the concepts that Baudrillard left behind have become guiding principles in an ever deteriorating situation. Much of these ideas, from the Hyperreal to Cultural Nihilism, were repopularised in the last 15 years through such books as Capitalist Realism, in which the poster child for critical theory, Mark Fisher, appeared to have left the world a message, written in blood on the inside of our shared prison cell: Baudrillard was right!

A lot of the most frightening confessions there drew primarily from Baudrillard such as the future collapsing in on itself, and all meaning and symbolism melting down into a delirious nihilism under the ever-rising heat of Capital as it establishes itself as an all-encompassing, totalising, technology-obsessed form of dominion, that thinks and acts of its own will, like an Artificial Intelligence that endlessly feeds itself data until all information has been devoured.

To say that we live in a simulation seems more true than ever, as we have less and less ability to affect anything, we reach out to influence what we see, only to realise time and time again that we are somehow cut off from the content, as if everything we know is just a projection on a wall; the horrors are real, and happening somewhere, but exist to us as holograms. We can but run our fingers through the beams of light projected on the wall, so close but so far from anything real.

We are psychiatric patients trapped in algorithmic cells, cut-off, stressed, and scared—the prophecies that caused Fisher to panic have, by this point, been completely realised. We have crossed over a threshold into a world that is both more-real than real, and yet entirely unintelligible and unintuitive, shifting wildly around and unfolding like a fever-dream. In the delirium of the simulation, nothing makes sense without knowing the codes that superficially hold everything together, and perhaps only Baudrillard figured out the code. After all, Baudrillard, with his ideas about code, the digital, quantum theory and hyperreality, seems to be one of the few who recognised early enough the true form of Capital as fictitious or speculative Capital. While his books may have once read like speculative, cynical horror-fictions about what could go wrong if Capital became an all-encompassing and nihilistic tyrant, now that this has come true, perhaps it is time to consult his ghost. It is time to admit that the worst case scenario has become real, and that the raving-mad cynic on the side of French Theory may have been talking the most sense, after all.

This book is an incredible serious diagnosis of the current form of capital, a profound excavation and presentation of the most important and helpful ideas that Baudrillard published: from the unravelling of western philosophy, to a redefining of marxist theories of economics and capital, to a shift in critical theory that complies with quantum theory.


Achim Szepanski, Force Inc. / Mille Plateaux
In the Delirium of the Simulation: Baudrillard Revisited by Achim Szepanski
Published by Becoming/Non, 2024, 978-9925-7984-7-6