Jean Baudrillard's "Symbolic Exchange & Death" (Part 1)
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- Опубліковано 28 тра 2024
- Link to Podcast site (new episodes added daily): theoretician.podbean.com/
Link to Patreon (for those whom can afford it): / theoryandphilosophy In this episode, I begin my exploration of Baudrillard's "Symbolic Exchange & Death," a key text in the Baudrillard canon. In it he unravels some key terms that guide much of his later work such as symbolic exchange, death, simulation, and sacrifice.
![Rick Roderick on Baudrillard - Fatal Strategies [full length]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/2U9WMftV40c/mqdefault.jpg)
In my opinion, the best chapter in the book is "the tactile in the digital",
Morphius: take the red pill or the blue pill
Baudrillard: bad Morphius!
Your videos are my life right now man, thank you : )
Happy to hear it :)
Thanks for this great reading companion for the text.
Really great to see these features on Baudrillard (+ the others) keep it up man. The quality is excellent both voice and the work even if you have some repetitive phrasing or whatever (it's hard to avoid those talking as one person about ideas for an hour++)
Haha I'm trying desperately to expand my syntactical vocabulary to avoid just that!
You are doing a great job, anyway I'm pretty sure having a diverse syntactical vocabulary is often just a simulacra of being eloquent... :) in all seriousness as someone who thinks the question of reversibility and a challenge of the singularity has been a really caricatured notion or perhaps just forgotten idea, it's brilliant to see someone else taking a stab at it and also trying to keep Baudrillard's ideas honest. I think it is hard to see Baudrillard from both within his view and sort of "outside" his view but it is important
In my opinion, what you discuss at 48:00 describes both the recent Capitol riot and the GME short squeeze
Hello!
Thank you for the video: I know it is quite a lot later, but do you happen to know by now where the quote:
‘How depressing is it to think of the world as a beautiful place with bad things happening in it all the time. I prefer to think of the world as a terrible place with moments of grace, with moments of good things happening.’
comes from?
Thanks
I'm sorry but I don't remember :/ If I had to guess, it would be from one of his "Cool Memories" books. If I stumble across it, I'll let you know!
What is the difference between turning marx against marx and turning the system against the system, what is the difference between reverability and mirroring?
"...If you will." Is better than, "per se."
"The reason that clichés become clichés is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication."
~Terry Pratchett
Even transitional phrases or ending phrases are useful clichés.
How about "as it were"?
Thanks for your videos. I've been reading Baudrillard as an autodidact and you've helped confirm that I'm not totally misunderstanding him. Would you be able to answer a few of my questions?
I was confused by your explanation of "indeterminacy" in Baudrillard. I thought he was referring to Marx's dialectical materialism and rejecting it, saying that capitalism no longer fits into that mold. It wasn't clear to me how swallowing up every cultural reality can be called "indeterminacy". Or does indeterminacy simply mean that the system is arbitrary and therefore its development is unpredictable? Maybe indeterminacy means that the system is unchanging and expands without developing. But then "indeterminacy" doesn't seem to make sense as the word to use there.
Baudrillard also uses the term "finality" and it's not clear at all to me what he means by it. It seems connected to determinacy but I can't suss it out.
You say a few times that there's no room in Baudrillard to redeem a presimulated era. You reference how the gold standard, even when it was used, was arbitrary. I see how in that lens the value of gold, and so gold itself, becomes just another sign among many. But Baudrillard is saying that we developed into this state of simulation, right? I believe that was the point of the procession of simulacra. Would he (or you) deny that there ever was a presimulated era, or would you only deny that it's possible to go back? Also, in his discussion of the ecological crisis, he seems to suggest that as the panic over resource preservation increases, production will, at least for a time, regain a referent in the real. That seems to contradict the rest of his thought though, so I'm not sure how to make sense of it.
Ya all very good points. I recently did a video disspelling the idea of a presimulated era which might be if use to you. As for indeterminacy, if I remember correctly, I think I used it to describe Baudrillard's appreciation of the unknown (i.e.) what hasn't been absorbed by scientific rationality. And I think I used the term finality to describe those things that have been totally demystified and 'explained' by the jackals of scientific 'truth' (of course, I'm not chastising good science here, I'm challenging people that co-opt science to supposedly explain away anytging that doesn't fit the dominant mold)
Logic of the potlach, gift of greater value, okay I got that. But those are humans. What makes one assume that the system itself would have any impetus to respond with a greater gift (or anything, actually)?
That is a very good question. I think the best I can do by way of an answer is to recall Baudrillard's critique of Bataille (can be found online). In that critique he makes the case that when the Aztecs performed sacrifices to the sun, they were effectively entering the sun into that very mode of exchange where the sun was then responsible to respond with a gift of equal or greater value (sunlight). This is how I look at it in terms of non-human entities but it could very well be pixie dust lol. In the Spirit of Terrorism Baudrillard expands on the idea, and your question directly I think. Thanks for that question!
Society as a whole "taking on the appearance of a factory" i think is analogous to the american exceptionalist refrain, every american president for the past few decade's has made, "we are a shining City on a hill", supposedly, and people should follow our lead, or stimulate the US. This is colonialism's shadow, the "zone of Influence ". It's as if art and culture are co-oped by multi-national corporation's to be packaged and sold to western client state dictatorships (usually lead by western educated citizens) to rationalize the outsourcing and exploitation of labor that is a direct result of the flight of capital away from social progress that then reappears in the client state under the guise of social progress. Mike Davis' "City of Quartz", really helped me see how capital flight, away from social progress, turned Los Angeles into the metropolis we know, just like when Castro shut down Havana to organized crime it created the vacuum that became Las Vegas written about in "The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America" by Sally Denton and Roger Morris. We are a hegemonic factory that attempts to create simulacrums of itself to be be exploited. cybernetics.
I love your voice I listen so much to you idk man fuck it ily
Your voice 😍😍
As a follower of Baudrillard I have to say I don't think your critiques of him are very good. You want to dismiss his theory as white philosophy and his thoughts on death as racist, when Baudrillard himself has theories of racism which are much better developed than whatever framework you are using to levy this criticism.
To your point that Baudrillard's taking death to undermine the system is racist because if that were true then black death would undermine the system: who says it doesn't? Isn't death a supercharged aspect of current politics which is shaking politics to its core? So I'm not sure why you think Baudrillard doesn't think black lives matter LOL. Just look at Transparency of Evil for some examples of his criticism of racism.
Baudrillard doesn't hem to the lines of today's commonly accepted feminism and postcolonialism, but these discourses are themselves commodified and adapted to the code of capitalism, so differing from them doesn't make Baudrillard racist.
I wish you were more upfront about what your divisions from Baudrillard are because it's weird for you to spend all this time describing his books when it seems you are not theoretically committed to understanding them in their own terms. I'm afraid you are trying to defuse the radical potential of Baudrillard in this moment, so some more clarity on your own views would be appreciated.
Thank you for your comment! When Baudrillard's mind wanders to areas pertaining to anything related to gender or race, my brain reminds me of a plethora of literature that has taken him to task on those fields (Sara Ahmed is a particularly good one; also, Maggie Nelson). With that being said, the primary way that I read Baudrillard is in the form of a challenge because I don't want to see him become, as he said of Foucault, 'a mirror of the powers he describes.' My issue with Baudrillard is his lack of restraint and subsequent lack of academic (or otherwise) citation of people of color. With all this being said, I really dig your enthusiasm, and I will be cognizant of it going forward :)
Theory & Philosophy
I'm glad you're receptive to the feedback! Dont mean to be harsh as well I thinl you've read more secondary literature than I have and JB is my favorite (im presenting at a conference on him later this year).
Have you read Grace's Baudrillard's Challenge? She takes up the "pimps of postmodernism" charge and provides a defense of Baudrillard against feminist critique at least (not the charge here admittedly).
I'm also aware that bell hooks cites Baudrillard approvingly in the chapter "eating the other" in Black Looks. Ward Churchill also cites Baudrillard as along the lines of what is needed in the Marxist tradition in the final chapter of "marxism and Native Americans."
That said I'm not at the endpoint of my engagement with Baudrillard by any means and i do appreciate your dedicating so much time to putting out lengthy engagements with his work.
On the topic of Baudrillard and postcolonialism I cant dispute what you say about him citing philosophers of color at the moment, but i think he is quite critical of Eurocentrism. Even in the mirror of production he defines his problem with Marxism as its ethnocentrism which i find quite compelling, particularly the section on the Judeo-Christian traditions conception of the soul/nature divide. While this is complicated by the racial status of jews, he emphasizes more the Christian side of Judeo-Christian.
In the end, I would also say that Baudrillard would not seek people defending him against charges of racism because his later writings emphasize everyone's complicity with the dominant hegemony. In other words it is not a moral question. I just think applying the dominant framework of race relations to his work can pretend to provide clarity in interpreting him where he notably valorized the attempt to render the world more mysterious.
Who knows? Perhaps we can one say collaborate in teasing out all these implications. My worry was simply that speaking of his philosophy of death as racist would prevent people from engaging with it. But I'm super happy with your response and will continue to follow your channel with great interest!
Race is mentioned in this reading only at 44:00, to call the poster for "dismissing Baudrillard due to whiteness" is quite unfair response to this video and reeks of white fragility
Try editing your podcasts. I personally can't believe anyone would listen to all three parts of this when they can read the book in the same amount of time. Your thoughts aren't worth that much time, sorry.
Emmanuel Thoreau Ya I figured that! that's why nearly every video since is much more concise. I'm impressed that you can tackle this book in 3 hours though--took me like a year :/