JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Jean Baudrillard is "a talisman: a symptom, a sign, a charm, and above all, a password into the next universe," (Kroker and Levin, BC 5); if you read too much Baudrillard "you are in danger of turning into a hyper-reader, and transforming the text under the power of your imagination into something of the sort it became in the hands of the Neo Geos and their apologists. At this point you are taking Baudrillard too seriously," (Danto, 48); "Baudrillard has begun to work equally hard at playing the Disappearing Theorist. He has progressively and deliberately abandoned the protocols of systematic research, scrupulous argument, thesis formulation, 'critique' -- in favor of a style of personal jotting (and jaunting) about the world ... this travelling man is no Mad Max. There's no sense in Baudrillard's glass bubble that anything nasty might happen," (Morris, HR, 28-9). "The upshot of Baudrillard's analyses is to license a kind of intellectual dandyism," (Callinicos, 147). And so, "in the end, does Theory ... come to embrace itself as work-of-art, dire object, and absolute commodity," (Morris, 101, 210).