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Image: Project
Baudrillard (remote:
http://www.uta.edu/english/cgb/Baud2/front3.html)
Jean Baudrillard
Providers: Brian Chen; Kate Liu / 劉
紀雯;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.
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