Banality is a theme Baudrillard returns to again and again in his writings and interviews. It is for him quite simply an inevitable product of modernity - everywhere modernity spreads, banality follows. “The desertifiation of signs and men” is a phrase that appears in one of Baudrillard’s most celebrated books,
Maybe I'm out of my depth, but do you think people can even survive without certainty/a narrative? Isn't that what makes the world intelligible in the first place? Without "what for?" the "what?" becomes just white noise - a bunch of trivia and factoids with no possible interpretation. Even the bodily senses of the world only have meaning through the evolutionary "telos" of survival of the fittest via trial-and-error, whether consciously recognized as such or not. Eg. a rabbit might not be conscious of this telos, but its smell, vision, hearing, interpretation, ie its entire phenomenology, is determined by this telos. Functionally, a "what for?" is inherently built into all of us from the ground up. And all this entirely within the empirical, scientific, kantian phenomenal realm.
So, in all this uncertainty, must there be and is there somewhere a backstop of intelligiblity, a narrative?
Maybe I'm out of my depth, but do you think people can even survive without certainty/a narrative? Isn't that what makes the world intelligible in the first place? Without "what for?" the "what?" becomes just white noise - a bunch of trivia and factoids with no possible interpretation. Even the bodily senses of the world only have meaning through the evolutionary "telos" of survival of the fittest via trial-and-error, whether consciously recognized as such or not. Eg. a rabbit might not be conscious of this telos, but its smell, vision, hearing, interpretation, ie its entire phenomenology, is determined by this telos. Functionally, a "what for?" is inherently built into all of us from the ground up. And all this entirely within the empirical, scientific, kantian phenomenal realm.
So, in all this uncertainty, must there be and is there somewhere a backstop of intelligiblity, a narrative?