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Image: Project
Baudrillard (remote)
Jean
Baudrillard
Providers:
Brian Chen;
Kate
Liu / ¼B¬ö¶²;Wanli
Liu
General Ideas & Questions
I. Different Phases of his Work
- "Starting with a re-evaluation
and critique of Marx's economic theory of the object, especially as
concerns the notion of 'use-value', JB develops the first major phase
of his work with a semiotically based theory of production and the obejct,
one that emphasises the 'sign-value' of objects.
- . . .from his writings
of the mid-1970s onwards, starting with Symbolic Exchange and Death,
B has taken uup the radical consequences, as he sees them, of the
pervasiveness of the code in late-modern societies. The code certainly
refers to computerisation, and to digitalisation, but it is also fundamental
in physics, biology and other natural sciences where it enables a perfect
reproduction of the object or situation; for this reason the code enables
a by-passing of the real and opens up what B has famously designated
as 'hyperreality'. (Lechte, 233)
II. Central Ideas: Code and Reproduction
- code: e.g. the binary code of computer technology; the DNA code in biology,
or the digital code in television and sound recording -- the code in
information technology.
- "Central to Baudrillard's
concerns is the connection between code and reproduction -- reproduction
which is itself 'original'. The code entials that the object
produced -- tissue in biology, for example -- is not a copy in the accepted
sense of the term, where the copy is the copy of an original, natural
object. (Lechte, 235)
- Use Value, Exchange
Value and Sign Value: (The following note explains why production is consumption,
and vice versa, for Baudrillard.)
[The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value.
... Exchange- value appears first of all as the quantitative relatin,
the proportion, in which use-values of one kind exchange for use-values
of another kind. ...
the exchange relation of
comodities is characterised precisely by its abstraction from their use-values"
(Marx Capital 126-27).
- Consumption in the
traditional economic sense: "the conversion of exchange value into
use value."
- Consumption in the
redefinition of the political economy of the sign:" includes the act of spending as
production of sign value . .. "
- "Precisely speaking,
there is no symbolic "value," there is only symbolic "exchange," which
defines itself precisely as something distinct from, and beyond value
and code. All forms of value (object, commodity or sign) must
be negated in order to inaugurate symbolic exchange. (Jean
Baudrillard Selected Writings 58-59)
VI. Questions:
- Simulations:
Are of the examples Baudrillard gives the same kind of simulacra?
- Do you think it is
good to be hyperreal? Or, do you find any crisis in the world
of simulations?
- Implosion: Do you see in our society that
opposites begin to collapse (between the
good and the evil, the active and the passive, cause and effect, ends
and means, etc.) and 'everything becomes
undecidable'? If Reagon, for Baurillard, does not have real power,
how about our president? How does our government simulate power?
General
- Is Baudrillard really
against science?
- Is there no more truthin
postmodern world? Where is "the desert of the real?" Do
we really have what B calls "a panic-stricken production of the real
and the referential"
Simulacra and Simulation
The
simulacrum is never what hides the truth--
it is truth that
hides the fact that there is none.
The
simulacrum is true.
--Ecclesiastes
Such would be the successive
phases of the image:
it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the *absence* of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any
reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
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In the first case, the
image is a good appearance--representation is of the sacramental
order. In the second, it is an evil appearance--it
is of the order of maleficence. In the
third, it plays at being
an appearance--it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is
no
longer of the order of appearances, but of simulation.
Baudrillard, "The Precession
of Simulacra," Simulacra and Simulation , p. 6.
Implosion:
". . .nothing separates one pole from
the other, the initial from the terminal: there is just a sort of
contraction into each other, a fantastic telescoping, a collapsing
of the two traditional poles into one another: an IMPLOSION --an
absorption of the radiating model of causality, of the differential
mode of determination, with its positive and negative electricity
-- an implosion of meaning. This is where simulation begins."
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The Examples of Simulation:
A. the biological and scientific
-- 1. simulation of symptoms; 10. DNA model reproduction; 11. Nuclear
deterrence
B. the religious -- 2. the simulacrum of divinity;
C. museumification of culture
-- 3. the return of the Tasaday; 4. the salvage of Rameses' mummy, 5.
return of part of a Cloister to its origin,
D. popular culture -- 6. Disney;
9. the filming of the Louds
E. the political -- 7. Watergate; 12. Vietnam
war, Algerian war
F. social crimes -- 8. all holdups, hijacks,
¡@
Lechte,
John. Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers. New York: Routledge,
1994.
¡@
(external)
Literary
Criticism Databank: Postmodernism and Urban Space ;
Postmodern Theories and Texts
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