I don't quite know what to make of this. A Dutch teenager has stolen 4,000 euros worth of virtual furniture from the virtual social networking site, Habbo Hotel . . . and he's been arrested for it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7094764.stm

I keep thinking of Baudrillard's claim about how subversion in the simulacrum is more complicit than that in the real . . . where does this fall?

The intricacies and online infrastructure for Halo are absolutely astounding. A few guys in my suite pointed this out to me, and my thoughts immediately leapt to postmodernism, probably to simulacra and simulation in particular, but to overarching narratives (hmm "incidental commonalities" might be a less loaded phrase) of pm in general.

While trying to get a grasp on Foucault's position on power, I was very intrigued by his negation of the "juridico-discursive" model of power. This maintains that there is always a negative relationship between sex and power where power's ultimate objective is to suppress sex. Of course, Foucault adamently contradicts this belief throughout the book as he claims that power works to bring sex into discourse. Rather than supressing sex, power wishes to approach it in a more controlled manner.

I suppose one of the integral themes of postmodernism is the denial of progress, but I keep hoping for Baudrillard to give us some guidelines on where to go from here. So what if we admit to ourselves that we are living in a simulacrum? We are living in a conspiracy world where the government and media feeds us images and events in the hopes that we will not question their morals or our reality. The notion of historical progress has collapsed and there is no reason for us to believe it will suddenly reignite. Now what?

On page 47, Baudrillard writes that "terrorism is always that of the real." I was perplexed by this claim; firstly because always is such a definitive term and it seemed odd that Baudrillard would use it so lightly. But more importantly because I had just processed his belief that there is no "ideolgical seriousness" in war. Battles and bombings are simply simulacrums to justify why a war is being fought in the first place. In fact, Baudrillard writes that war is finished before it even begins. And the media simply regurgitates images to feed into this supposed necessity of war.

In the section about simulacra in religion (p. 4-5), Baudrillard writes about how Iconoclasts, who "predicted the omnipotence of simulacra," feared images based on the knowledge "that deep down God never existed, that only the simulacrum ever existed, even that God himself was never anything but his own simulacrum." (4)

I am very interested in Haraway's call for a reconstitution of the ways in which we organize ourselves as an act of political transgression - and moreover, recentering of the marginalized in postmodern space. Haraway encourages us to name the fictionalization of the 'identities' to which we currently cling as our social markers, then to move past these constructed delineations. In calling for an oppositional unity constituted by "affinity, not identity" (p. 154), she is asking us to reposition ourselves against history, to bring forward that which has been systemically neglected.