Jean Baudrillard, 1929-2002. Best known for the concepts of “simulacrum” and “hyperreality.” His writing style is both an academic analysis and a performance. He may be more popular with curators than professors.
Chapter 3. Narratives of Primitivism
An examination of some early work by Baudrillard. In it Baudrillard depicted supposedly originary societies whose characteristics he related explicitly or implicitly to the characteristics of our own postmodern period.
· Explain how, according to Bataille, the class struggle arose because the bourgeoise does not engage in excessive displays of expenditure/destruction.
· Discuss the following suggestion by Lane: “If, on the other hand, he [Baudrillard] can prove that the concepts of "savage," "primitive" or "potlatch," for example, are aporias - blind spots that unravel the founding presuppositions of Western thought - then his primitivist discourse is deconstructive in some sense.” (58)
Chapter 4. Reworking Marxism
A critique of Marx on the basis that in a new type of capitalist society (a “society of consumption”) goods become signs with “symbolic exchange value” on top of Marx’ “exchange value.” Not all societies, Baudrillard believes, and not all historical periods, were characterized, as is classic capitalism, by production aimed at increasing material wealth. In primitive society, as today, symbolic wealth was what mattered (more?). Today consumption is at least as important as production. Consumption centers on products as signs of symbolic wealth. It is incorporated into production as a single system, which generates both products and the need for products.
· What to both Marx and Baudrillard is the difference between use value and exchange value?
· What to Baudrillard is the difference between exchange value and symbolic exchange value?
· Baudrillard thinks that Marxism works well for only a specific historical period, characterized by the “order of production;” indeed that Marx privileged production as the source of a “grand narrative” of history for the reason that he lived in an age dominated by new forms of capitalist production. Is “class struggle” one of the concepts that do not survive into the present “symbolic order” of society?
Chapter 5. Simulation and the Hyperreal
A hyperreality or virtual reality has replaced “real” reality. Hyperreality is generated by models of what we want reality to be.
·
Explain what Baudrillard meant when he said that
the Gulf War never took place. Will a
war against
· The concept of the “hyperreal” is intended to do damage to the concept of the sign as a conjunction of signifier and signified (even at Barthes’ mythological level). Can you think of signs (in the literal, non-technical sense, i.e. billboards) that have no clear signified? Do they have any signified?