Kritik Toolbox Supplement – bfhhr general
Download 1.09 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Neolib has changed too much for his kritik to make sense
- Cap’s the root cause of their symbolic exchange stuff
- Cap is root cause of hyperreality
- Baudrillard over determines political potentiality --- that makes challenges to class structure impossible
- Their implosion makes concentrated and collective struggle impossible
- Invoking simulacra is a capitalist ploy to distract from materialism
at: capitalism impactBeing as leftist as possible dooms Baurdillard’s resistance to capitalNoys 10 --- Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Chichester (Benjamin, 2010, “THE PERSISTENCE OF THE NEGATIVE,” Edinburgh University Press, 7-2-16, pages 4-6)//jonah Let us return to the history of post- 68 theory with this orientation in mind. Antonio Negri endorses the hypothesis of Michael Hardt that: ‘while in the nineteenth century France did politics and Germany did metaphysics, in the twentieth century France did metaphysics and Italy did politics’.11 My argument is that particularly in the 1970s France did metaphysics as a means of doing politics. I want to begin by isolating a series of theoretical interventions made in the early 1970s, which all responded to the new libertarian mood induced by May ’68. The confluence of various discourses of liberation, notably sexual liberation, produced new discourses of contestation directed against capitalism, but also against the limits of the existing left. While many on the left responded to the rapid ebbing of the events of May with calls to Maoist or Leninist discipline, others argued the need to pursue the quasi- anarchist path of liberation from all structures of discipline – left or right. Three works were key expressions of this tendency, and were often grouped together, despite mutual antagonisms, as the ‘philosophy of desire’: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti- Oedipus (1972); Jean- François Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy (1974); and Jean Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976). These texts all display their authors’ formation by currents of the ultra- left,12 and each tries to outdo the other in terms of their radicalism. In particular they reply to Marx’s contention that ‘[t]he real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself’,13 by arguing that we must crash through this barrier by turning capitalism against itself. They are an exotic variant of la politique du pire: if capitalism generates its own forces of dissolution then the necessity is to radicalise capitalism itself: the worse the better. We can call this tendency accelerationism. 14 Whereas the Anglo- American New Left had sought out the negation of capital in the supposedly unintegrated subjects of revolt, such as the lumpen- proletariat, students or the peasantry, accelerationists tried to identify new subjects of revolt as being those most radically within capitalism. If, as Lyotard put it, ‘desire underlies capitalism too’,15 then the result is that: ‘there are errant forces in the signs of capital. Not in its margins as its marginals, but dissimulated in its most “nuclear”, the most essential exchanges’. What the accelerationists affirm is the capitalist power of dissolution and fragmentation, which must always be taken one step further to break the fetters of capital itself. For Deleuze and Guattari the problem of capitalism is not that it deterritorialises, but that it does not deterritorialise enough. It always runs up against its own immanent limit of deterritorialisation – the reterritorialisation of the decoded fl ows of desire through the ‘machine’ of the oedipal grid. In the face of the deterritorialising axiomatic of capital we have ‘[n]ot to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to “accelerate the process”, as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.’ 17 It is the fi gure of the schizophrenic, not to be confused with the empirical psychiatric disorder, which instantiates this radical immersion and the coming of a new porous and collective ‘subject’ of desire. The schizophrenic is the one who ‘seeks out the very limit of capitalism: he is its inherent tendency brought to fulfi lment’.18 Contrary to Deleuze and Guattari’s faith in a subject who would incarnate a deterritorialisation in excess of capitalism, Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy denies any exteriority, insisting that capital itself ‘is the unbinding of the most insane drives’,19 which releases ‘mutant intensities’.20 The true form of capital is incarnated in the a- subjective fi gure of the libidinal ‘band’ – a Möbius strip of freely circulating intensities with neither beginning nor end. The extreme results of such a position are summarised in Lyotard’s notorious statement on the experience of the worker in the nineteenth century – the most overt acceptance of all the consequences of an accelerationist position: there is jouissance in it, the English unemployed did not have to become workers to survive, they – hang on tight and spit on me – enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolutions of their families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in morning and evening.21 The Marxist concept of alienation collapses because there is nothing left to alienate – capital itself is jouissance. There is no longer a true or real economy of desire somehow repressed or alienated by capital, but only the fl ickering appearance of a disenchanted libidinal economy on the far side of capitalism. Jean Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) is a more ambivalent and uneasy example of accelerationism. If Lyotard outbids Deleuze and Guattari then, initially, Baudrillard outbids Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard. He argues that their collective retention of the signifier of desire leaves them all locked into a dialectics of liberation tied to the functioning of the system. As he would later put it in Forget Foucault (1977) the attempt ‘to rediscover a phantasmal and instinctual truth of the body in desire, is still only to unearth the psychic metaphor of capital.’ 22 In a critique of accelerationism avant la lettre Baudrillard argues that this ‘compulsion toward liquidity, flow, and an accelerated circulation’ is only the replica or mirror of capitalist circulation.23 The difficulty is that Baudrillard’s own catastrophising strategy comprises a kind of negative accelerationism in which he seeks the point of immanent reversal that inhabits and destabilises capital. In Symbolic Exchange and Death this is the ‘death- function’, which ‘cannot be programmed and localised’.24 Against the law of value that determines market exchange Baudrillard identifies this ‘death- function’ with the excessive and superior form of ‘symbolic exchange’ which is ‘based on the extermination of value’.25 We have reached the (literally) terminal point of resistance to capitalism. The problem for this strategy, pointed out by Lyotard in Libidinal Economy when reacting to Baudrillard’s earlier work, is that perhaps ‘[t]here is as much libidinal intensity in capitalist exchange as in the alleged “symbolic” exchange’.26 Baudrillard’s reversible point is vitiated by capital’s own powers of intensity. For Lyotard, Baudrillard fails to draw all the consequences of a radically immanent thought: the abandonment of any critique or critical position. It is an irony, as we shall see, that Lyotard himself would soon return to the relative certainties of Kantian critique. Baurdillard’s conception of symbolic exchange follow and replicate capitalist tactics --- this makes communist politics impossibleNoys 5 --- Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Chichester (Benjamin, 5-31-05, “The Culture of Death,” Berg, 7-2-16, pages 25-27)//jonah What Baudrillard stresses is that although modern culture tries to exclude death it fails. Today the dead are not included within the space of the city, either in charnel-houses or in cemeteries attached to churches, but are excluded by being placed in mass cemeteries which lie outside the city. However, the more our culture tries to push the reality of death away, the more it tries to isolate the dead, the more death threatens to invade our whole culture. Baudrillard can then agree with the idea that death has become taboo but also argue that this process has failed and that it leaves us more exposed to death. How does this take place? For Baudrillard socalled ‘primitive’ cultures used to organise symbolic exchange with the dead, regarding them in some sense as present, but today we try not to deal with the dead at all. The result is that ‘we trade with our dead in a kind of melancholy, while the primitives live with their dead under the auspices of the ritual and the feast’ (Baudrillard, 1993: 135). What has caused this is the decline and eclipse of symbolic exchange due to the rise of capitalism. A New Time of Death? 25 Capitalism is organised around market exchanges in which goods are exchanged through the medium of money. The emphasis is often on the fairness of exchange, on the idea that the market-place adjusts prices through competition, and on anonymous exchange where the producers of goods and their consumers are separated in space and time. What has been lost in this market-based exchange is the idea of symbolic exchange. This is a form of exchange which is not based on getting something equal in return for what we spend but exchange as an unbalanced and excessive social process. The classic example of symbolic exchange is that of gift-giving, in particular the Native American practice of potlatch. The word is from the Chinook language and means ‘to give’. It is the name for a ceremonial feast of northwest coast tribes at which the host distributed his possessions as gifts to his guests. These gifts could be material things like blankets and furniture, but also food, and they would win honour for the host. What interested anthropologists in this gift-giving was that it could also seemingly run out of control, with whole villages being made destitute in trying to provide gifts. Capitalism replaces this form of exchange, which is based on social prestige and direct personal relationships, with forms of exchange based on calculation and the anonymity of the market. For Baudrillard this eclipse of symbolic exchange also affected our relationship with death In a sense death takes its revenge on us as, for Baudrillard, death can never be fully programmed or contained by the postmodern society of images. The dead resist the process of exchange and cannot be fully integrated into the capitalist economy. This is despite the fact that, as Nancy Mitford pointed out in her 1963 book The American Way of Death (1998), a scathing exposé of funeral home practices, there is a great deal of money to be made in the funeral business. Baudrillard emphasised that this return of the dead would force us to rediscover symbolic exchange or we would be left with a culture that had become terminal. Either we deal with the dead through symbolic exchange, or we become the living dead, like the zombie consumers of Dawn of the Dead. His work is almost a parody of those radical thinkers of the 1960s who tried to find resistance in those who could not be integrated into the system, whether that was women, students, lesbians and gays, petty criminals or African-Americans. It seems as if, for Baudrillard, the dead are the only ones who cannot be integrated! The problem with his model is that it offers no real explanation for why death comes to invade our whole culture. His idea of a radical reversal, when what is excluded returns in a more virulent form, is extremely hard to pin down concretely. This leaves his argument ungrounded and it is no surprise that it has been greeted with scepticism. In comparison, whatever criticisms we might want to make of it, Agamben’s analysis of our exposure to death is more concretely grounded. The increasing exposure to death in modern culture is understood as the result of the act of sovereign power that creates bare life, a life exposed to death. In modern culture this production of bare life has spread because bare life has become the ground of our political identity. Agamben does not regard death as some point of resistance that somehow lies outside our culture. In treating death as a point of resistance Baudrillard is in danger of turning death into some sort of authentic experience where we can find, or recover, our true values. In fact, the exposure to death in modern culture seems to be, as we shall see later in this book, a far more banal and everyday process. Baudrillard’s model does explore our exposure to death in modern culture but it seems to offer no adequate explanation for that exposure. it offers something like a magical or metaphysical thinking where what is excluded can only ever return in a more extreme form. Agamben provides an analysis which is more precise but which is also not beyond criticism. If Baudrillard’s thesis has proven controversial and been treated with scepticism then so have Agamben’s claims. In particular, his history of bare life has faced five major criticisms. The first is that Agamben’s theory concerning bare life is not well supported by the historical evidence and that he is selective in the evidence he draws on. Secondly, that Agamben’s history of bare life is too straightforward, too linear, and so doesn’t really deal with the complex nature of the social history of death. Thirdly, that in only studying Western culture Agamben is ethnocentric, and that he excludes evidence from other cultures and tends to treat Western culture as a monolithic whole. Fourthly, that Agamben’s model of biopolitics tends to erase the important distinctions between different political systems, especially between democracies and totalitarian states. And, finally, that he does not consider in enough depth the different experiences of exposure to death, or the fact that this exposure to death is unevenly distributed. Baudrillard’s critique of Marx is just as totalizing as the systems he criticizes --- but worse because it has zero warrantZander 14 --- Associate Professor at Aalborg University (PäR-Ola Zander, 7-7-2014, "Baudrillard's Theory of Value: A Baby in the Marxist Bath Water?" Taylor & Francis, 7-11-2016)//jonah The Problems with Baudrillard's Anti-Marxism Baudrillard has lined up a number of arguments for abandoning Marxism, and perhaps as a result, his value theory has not attracted wide attention. Nevertheless, I will argue both that we can see some major weaknesses with the abandonment and also for the potential in his value theory. Although Smith (1990) dealt with Baudrillard's arguments in MoP, additional consideration is warranted. Before this attack on Baudrillard's late position, I want to highlight that his transition from Marxism to anti-Marxism does not mean the rejection of all his previous insights before MoP. It should be noted that the French subtitle of Mirror of Production is critique du matérialisme historique. Baudrillard concentrates his attack primarily on historical materialism, which is only a single part of the Marxian system, although some of the central tenets of dialectical materialism also get their share of critique. Baudrillard positions himself beyond needs, beyond truth, beyond ideology, and beyond revolution. Smith (1990) has convincingly refuted all these claims by showing that they are either untenable or tenable but compatible with the writings of Marx. But an important criticism not mentioned by Smith concerns Baudrillard's critique of historical universalism. The Marxist conceptions of (for example) history and material production are developed within the temporal context of capitalism. Marx conceives history as the history of modes of production, and thus periods before capitalism can also be analyzed through production, the concept is no longer temporal, and the Marxist analysis becomes universal (see Baudrillard 1975, 48). Baudrillard objects to this universalism, peculiarly enough by merely postulating that there were no dialectics in primitive societies. Poster (1975) rightly points out that this argument is problematic in several ways. Poster's strongest argument states that, if we accept that applying any contemporary concept to the past is a kind of universalism, Baudrillard is defeated by his own argument. Poster observes that Baudrillard's texts are infested with such “universalism.” For instance, his semiotic concepts are problematic, as he employs them on all stages of human societies without justification. Another problem is that Baudrillard has framed his critique so that it is in need of empirical support. He claims that there are no longer any exchange-value transactions untouched by sign values. That begs for empirical evidence, and the onus is on Baudrillard, if he is to be believed, rather than other social scientists. There may be some nonempirical explanation as to why exchange-value transactions must be dominated by sign values, but that is not the way Baudrillard frames the discussion. Instead, he treats current trends and possibilities as finalities, treats tendencies as realized states (see Kellner 1989), and extrapolates wildly from interesting insights (see Smith 1990). Related to this, Baudrillard makes no qualification or delimitation as to the scope of his ideas. Indeed, he tends to totalize the system of the society. This is very problematic because totalization is the germ source that will cause Baudrillard to rule out all political strategies, including his own theoretical interventions. In his later works, Baudrillard positions himself, in Smith's (1990) words, “beyond truth,” yet Baudrillard's arguments (in particular those in MoP) are made in such a way as to invite empirical evidence. He extrapolates from singular cases in his search for a strategy. From studies in fashion (CS), goods consumption (MoP), and French Communist Party activity (UB), Baudrillard wildly extrapolates that every political activity has one or more sign values as its objective, making any political activity futile (including even gifts and Saussurean anagrams). But this is an unwarranted extrapolation. A political activity that is use-value-oriented is conceivable, and theorization may also be proffered as an act governed by use value. A final problem is that his later theories generally overlook or neglect many aspects of many people's current social experience. This does not necessarily make the theory false—but it needs to be taken into account (Kellner 1989). How does Baudrillard respond to the many third-world workers who feel resentment over their labor being exploited? According to Baudrillard, they should rather be immersed in sign-value-related activity, such as identity management. He leaves unarticulated whether the perception of social injustice is exactly that. Before there is reason to take Baudrillard's later standpoints seriously, they need to be grounded in empirical investigations, or at least theoretically justified. What stands clear from the analysis of Baudrillard's attack on Marxism is that, while some of it is relevant, the attack is far too weak to justify abandoning his own value theory altogether—his theory from “within”—from the power of that analysis alone. And while Baudrillard simply abandoned Marxism because he thought that he had proven it completely untenable, there is no problem in continuing down the path from which he diverted. Neolib has changed too much for his kritik to make senseGane 15 --- founder member of the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough, PhD at the London School of Economics, Emeritus Professor at Loughborough University (Mike, 2015, “The Cultural Logics of Neoliberalism,” Cultural Politics, Duke University Press, 7-3-16, pages 9-12)//jonah Jacques Donzelot was a colleague of Baudrillard’s at Nanterre and taught a course jointly with him. His recollections subsume Baudrillard’s contributions to a kind of “patasociology,” an extreme analysis. In fact, “no one is more radical and all other radicalisms seem ridiculous as a result.” But there is a downside: “The patasociologist . . . denies sociological truth and indeed truth itself; denies good in the name of evil and reality in the name of the simulacrum. . . . Does he have a system of thought? Yes, if you want to put it that way. But, as with Nietzsche, it is a system-dismantling system” (Donzelot 2011: 368). This judgment is one-sided, since Baudrillard did produce a system that is open to correction; in other words, it was certainly not in denial of truth and, in some respects, was simply not radical enough to deal with the ruthless radicalism of neoliberalization and neoliberal doctrine and practice (see Klein 2007; Peck 2010) or the wider effects, such as the emergence of the “seventh” continent—the circulating mass of plastic in the oceans. The strange resort to pataphysics to evoke the neoliberal world seems to be an ornament and not vital or indeed radical at all, as Donzelot claims. Baudrillard bizarrely absolves pataphysics from his semiocapitalism. In the logic of neoliberal games, the subject-object polarities are reversed: the world thinks us. In terms of pataphysics, it is essential to play Baudrillard against Baudrillard, for if, as he says, the world itself has become pataphysical, it satirizes us, mocks us, ridicules us, toys with us. He once asked of the tactic used by Exxon: “The American government asks the multinational for a general report on all its activities throughout the world. The result is twelve volumes of a thousand pages each . . . where is the information?” (1990a: 13). But where is his analysis of the dissimulation of the manufacture of uncertainty developed? (see Oreskes and Conway 2010). Yet his famous injunction that “the task of thought is to make the world, if possible, even more enigmatic and unintelligible” (2001: 151) is the perfect formula of the neoliberal world’s efforts at such agnatology; this has been defined by Mirowski as “the manufacture of doubt and uncertainty” and, as such, goes far beyond propaganda, since “its hallmark techniques thrive off a hermeneutics of suspicion, with the result that the populace can maintain the comfortable fiction that it is not being manipulated by the obscure interests funding the initiatives” (Mirowski 2013: 226–27). These moves within contemporary neoliberalism complicate considerably the classical conception of market knowledge as truth by Hayek, or veridiction by Foucault ([2004] 2010: 34). With the switch of polarities has come, especially after the revelatory events of 2008, a situation in which the banks and the corporations become “too big to fail.” Baudrillard remarks in an interview with François L’Yvonnet that he was again thinking of the importance of pataphysics because: “Once achieved, this integral reality is the Ubuesque accomplishment par excellence! Pataphysics might be said to be the only response to this phenomenon, both in its total confusion—it’s neither critical nor transcendent, it’s the perfect tautology of this integral reality, it’s the science of sciences—and at the same time it’s the monstrousness of it too” (2004: 5). Baudrillard was, in this crucial instance, reluctant in the end to let go of his pataphysical project and to follow its flourishing in the object; he did not say: Ubu thinks us. But something in the gaze from the Other had certainly changed (L’Yvonnet’s own discussion of Baudrillard’s pataphysics [2013: 49–58] does not register this change). If we follow this back to the turning point in the mid-1970s of the BNP advertisement, Baudrillard refers to this once more in The Transparency of Evil, noting: “[The] banker got up like a vampire, saying, ‘I am after you for your money.’ A decade has already gone by since this kind of obscenity was introduced, with the government’s blessing, into our social mores. At the time we thought the ad feeble because of its aggressive vulgarity. In point of fact it was a prophetic commercial, full of intimations of the future shape of social relationships, because it operated, precisely, in terms of disgust, avidity and rape” (1993c: 73). And in one of his last texts, Baudrillard again refers to the BNP campaign, this time linked to the theme of evil: “What was new and scandalous was having these words come direct from the bankers themselves, the truth coming straight from the mouth of Evil . . . of the dominant power itself, and that power, secure in the knowledge of its total immunity” (2010b: 57). We can now turn back to his initial analysis. It was first published in 1974 in Utopie (Baudrillard [1974] 2006, which reproduces the images from the bank’s campaign) and included in 1976 in L’Echange Symbolique et la Mort as a long footnote about the advertisement: “Votre argent m’interésse—donnant donnant—vous me prêtez votre argent, je vous fais profiter de ma banque” (1976: 53). He makes four points. First, this statement about value is usually hidden: “Candour is a second-degree mask” of exploitation. Second, there is a “macho complicity where men share the obscene truth of capital. Hence the smell of lechery . . . of the eyes glued to your money as if it were your genitals . . . a perverse provocation which is much more subtle than the simplistic seduction of the smile . . . the slogan quite simply signifies: ‘I am interested in your arse—fair’s fair—lend me your buttocks and I’ll bugger you.’” Third, there is the crucial switch behind this new obscenity: the law of equivalence of value (a = a; a = a + a′) is no longer dominant, thus this apparent restatement of it is a supplementary mystification. In so many words: “Capital no longer thrives on the rule of any economic law, which is why the law can be made into an advertising slogan, falling into the sphere of the sign and its manipulation.” Fourth, it might be thought this advertisement simply reveals the desire for open extraction of profit, but in fact, there is a new tautology here. A bank is a bank, not a = a + a′ but A is A: “that is to say a bank is a bank, a banker is a banker, money is money, and you can do nothing about it.”9 Perhaps this is Ubu reborn as banker, or en route to become the new cynically aggressive Ubu—Ubu as vampire? It is certainly clear that this is not the maternal mode of participative repression Baudrillard described in consumerism ([1969] 2001). There is something curiously static and nostalgic in Baudrillard’s relation to pataphysics (1976); he said the only strategy against the hyperrealist system is some form of pataphysics. And thirty years later, in The Intelligence of Evil (2005): “Integral Reality corresponds to the pataphysical sphere. . . . Ubu is the very symbol of this plethoric reality and, at the same time, the only response to the Integral Reality, the only solution that is truly imaginary in its fierce irony, its grotesque fullness. The great spiral belly of Pa Ubu is the profile of our world and its umbilical entombment” (2005: 45). There is a kind of nostalgia for the pataphysics that he adopted in his youth (and that, as he admitted, played havoc with his early career [2004: 4–5]). And if we turn to his early piece on pataphysics, we can see that his relationship to it was far from being unambiguous—he rejected it in favor of Artaud’s theater of Cultural Politics Published by Duke University Press Mike Gane Cultural P o litics • 11:1 March 2015 12 cruelty, for “pataphysics is impossible” ([1948] 2005: 215). It was both a basis of ironic critique that he wanted and one that he had already rejected—one that he never worked through, developed, and assessed. It remained as it always was, a precocious but childish unchanging resource that he had disavowed: “pataphysics was a kind of esoteric parenthesis” and “pataphysics isn’t a reference for me . . . things have to be lost”—they disappear, disperse like anagrams in what follows (2004: 6). Baudrillard could not let go of a pataphysics, and it remained an obscure object. No one has yet studied the way in which it functions in his writings (though see Genosko 1994; Teh 2006). It is linked to a concept of freedom that is quite different from that of the neoliberals. For neoliberals, one must accept the responsibility “as a subject, for the objective conditions of one’s own life.” But, Baudrillard argues: “As long as I am subject to objective conditions, I am still an object, I am not wholly free—I have to be freed from that freedom itself. And this is possible only in play, in that more subtle freedom of play, the arbitrary rules of which paradoxically free me, whereas in reality I am kept in chains by my own will” (2001: 56–57). But pataphysics remained a favorite toy, not anagrammatic; it is the image of the world (in its absurdity), and it is the “only response” to the world (by treating it as a method of finding imaginary solutions to problems that do not exist). Thus if there is an occlusion of the ways in which the world is reconstructed in alignment with liberalization, it nevertheless shows through, and Ubu is a medium of ventriloquous evil (2010b: 61). For example, Baudrillard could write acutely on the burning of cars in the banlieues in France in “The Pyres of Autumn” (2006), for as he said, notoriously, “even signs must burn” ([1972] 1981: 163), but the initiation ritual of the student Bullingdon Club at Oxford University—the club of which both Cameron and Osborne were previously members—which involved burning a £50 note in front of a tramp, and which came to light in the British press in February 2013, is a newly invented neoliberal ritual that Baudrillard did not foresee.10 Baudrillard’s entire argument is our alt solvency and link warrants --- capitalism is important for the communist goal by serving as unifying goal to inspire collective resistanceGilman-Opalsky 10 --- Associate Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois (Richard Gilman-Opalsky, 2010, "Selectively Forgetting Baudrillard: Rescuing Praxis From The Wreckage." Theory In Action. Vol. 3 Issue 2, 6-30-2016, pages 13-14)//jonah Also, he attacks any romanticization of the proletarian subject position, arguing that this leads to reification of capitalist production as an independent variable. In other words, Marx’s conception of revolution requires capitalist production, and the whole history of Marxism since Marx’s death has been unconsciously trapped in a fetishization of production derived from a distinctly capitalist logic. Marxism celebrates a revolutionary subject that owes its existence to capitalism, and whose special powers are concentrated in them by their immiseration within the producing class. To counter this, Baudrillard draws our attention to the rebelliousness of the elderly, of women, of racial, ethnic, and even linguistic minorities, dropouts, and young people, pointing to other locations for subversion and revolt than the working class. He writes: “This position of revolt is no longer that of the economically exploited; it aims less at the extortion of surplus value than at the imposition of the code, which inscribes the present strategy of social domination… It is a revolt of those who have been pushed aside, who have never been able to speak or have their voices heard… These revolts do not profile class struggle… The working class is no longer the gold standard of revolts and contradictions. There is no longer a revolutionary subject of reference.”12 With this, Baudrillard effectively destabilizes the rigidity of certain readings of historical materialism in more orthodox variations of Marxism (I would include Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács here who were both critical of orthodox Marxism yet maintained the working class as “a revolutionary subject of reference.”). From another location, not circumscribed by economic exploitation, revolt no longer “mirrors” the capitalist fixation on production. But revolt from other places is not concentrated in any certain social group or subject position. It is, therefore, not inexorable, not determined by political-economic structures, and certainly not predictable. Cap’s the root cause of their symbolic exchange stuffNoys 5 --- Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Chichester (Benjamin, 5-31-05, “The Culture of Death,” Berg, 7-2-16, page 25)//jonah What Baudrillard stresses is that although modern culture tries to exclude death it fails. Today the dead are not included within the space of the city, either in charnel-houses or in cemeteries attached to churches, but are excluded by being placed in mass cemeteries which lie outside the city. However, the more our culture tries to push the reality of death away, the more it tries to isolate the dead, the more death threatens to invade our whole culture. Baudrillard can then agree with the idea that death has become taboo but also argue that this process has failed and that it leaves us more exposed to death. How does this take place? For Baudrillard socalled ‘primitive’ cultures used to organise symbolic exchange with the dead, regarding them in some sense as present, but today we try not to deal with the dead at all. The result is that ‘we trade with our dead in a kind of melancholy, while the primitives live with their dead under the auspices of the ritual and the feast’ (Baudrillard, 1993: 135). What has caused this is the decline and eclipse of symbolic exchange due to the rise of capitalism. A New Time of Death? 25 Capitalism is organised around market exchanges in which goods are exchanged through the medium of money. The emphasis is often on the fairness of exchange, on the idea that the market-place adjusts prices through competition, and on anonymous exchange where the producers of goods and their consumers are separated in space and time. What has been lost in this market-based exchange is the idea of symbolic exchange. This is a form of exchange which is not based on getting something equal in return for what we spend but exchange as an unbalanced and excessive social process. The classic example of symbolic exchange is that of gift-giving, in particular the Native American practice of potlatch. The word is from the Chinook language and means ‘to give’. It is the name for a ceremonial feast of northwest coast tribes at which the host distributed his possessions as gifts to his guests. These gifts could be material things like blankets and furniture, but also food, and they would win honour for the host. What interested anthropologists in this gift-giving was that it could also seemingly run out of control, with whole villages being made destitute in trying to provide gifts. Capitalism replaces this form of exchange, which is based on social prestige and direct personal relationships, with forms of exchange based on calculation and the anonymity of the market. For Baudrillard this eclipse of symbolic exchange also affected our relationship with death Cap is root cause of hyperrealityMernagh 14 --- Irish philosopher (Simon Mernagh, 11-13-2014, "Hyperreality in Late Capitalism" American Literature and Culture at Queen's, 7-2-2016, https://blogs.qub.ac.uk/americanists/2014/11/13/hyperreality-in-late-capitalism/)//jonah According to Fredric Jameson, postmodernism is “the cultural logic of late capitalism” (550). In addition to the expansion of forms considered ‘literary’ and a dedicated interrogation of hitherto unchallenged cultural metanarratives, postmodernism is partially defined by considerations of ‘hyperreality’, or a reality dominated by symbols and signs which signify no deeper meaning. America, as a bastion of postmodern literary movements and capitalist ethos, boasts a profoundly hyperreal society and culture. Throughout his Travels in Hyperreality, Eco recounts the American museums filled with updated and ‘improved’ reconstructions of classical ancient and Renaissance artworks, noting that visitors “enjoy the conviction that imitation has reached its apex and afterwards reality will always be inferior to it” (46); to contemporary audiences, a three-dimensional, human-scale diorama of Da Vinci’s Last Supper, complete with audible dialogue and a hymnal soundtrack, is more appealing than a mere painting. As an inherently visual medium, simulation is vividly expressed in film. The depiction of the cinematic simulacrum of Las Vegas in Casino and Ocean’s Eleven mirrors Baudrillard’s definition of Disneyland as a location “presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real” (10); Las Vegas is regarded as the zenith of capitalist extravagance and overwhelming hedonism, as if the typical American city of ‘late capitalism’ did not espouse these same ideals. Simulation harbours severe socio-political ramifications. Baudrillard argues that the Watergate ‘scandal’ acts as a hyperreal decoy used to defer attention away from the truly scandalous effects of neoliberal economics. Similarly, the German police in Anton Corbijn’s adaptation of John Le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man demand a swift apprehension of the titular Chechen refugee in order to publicly present a victorious battle amidst the ‘War on Terror’. If “it takes a minnow to catch a barracuda” and “a barracuda to catch a shark” (Corbijn), a minnow supersedes a shark in this artificial, rhetorical hyperreality. However, to evoke Arendtian thought, it is in the banal where simulation manifests in its most insidious form. A ‘Big Mac’ bought in Belfast will match those available in Boston and Belgrade. Yet, ‘McDonalds’ is not real – the buildings exist in the physical realm, as do its staff and produce, but there is no singular entity which can be highlighted and categorically designated as ‘McDonalds’; the restaurants are individual signifiers, representing an unreal, or hyperreal signified. How do we respond to a world dominated by simulacra? Do we accept it as a harmless by-product of free-market globalized capitalism, or should we adopt the “psychotic” (Žižek, 9) position of maintaining a critical distance from the symbolic order of hyperreality? Baudrillard over determines political potentiality --- that makes challenges to class structure impossibleZander 14 --- Associate Professor at Aalborg University (PäR-Ola Zander, 7-7-2014, "Baudrillard's Theory of Value: A Baby in the Marxist Bath Water?" Taylor & Francis, 7-11-2016)//jonah For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (CPES) also anticipated Baudrillard's coming rejection of Marxism. During his career Baudrillard gradually developed his critique of Marx's “productivism” and disregard for signs, until his explicit attack on Marxism in Mirror of Production (MoP)—an attempt to go beyond “the productivist paradigm”—in which he introduces a terminology for theorizing about things beyond production. He claims that there was an actual-empirical shift in society that Marx never identified: namely, a time when the affluence of goods became so extreme that capitalism transformed itself in order to make people want more goods than previously. He also drops the value theory in MoP because he deemed use values and exchange values to be defective. When comparing Baudrillard's early and late writings from a value-theory perspective, the following contrasts stand out.6 As can be seen, the break with his earlier Marxist position is not a sudden rupture in Baudrillard's thinking but is rather a gradual shift. This shift is not limited to a new way of seeing political economy: Baudrillard also shifts position on a number of epistemological and ontological issues; he begins leaning toward less agency for the individual and toward more dualistic conceptualizations. Furthermore, he expresses an “antimaterialist” view of language. It is not possible to say, however, that these changes triggered a new stance toward value. The shift in position is more muddled than that. Even after MoP, Baudrillard is still a radical trying to find a way to disrupt the system of capitalism, although the belief in a revolution of the masses is abandoned. By the time of Symbolic Exchange and Death (SD), he has come to the conclusion that signs govern every action, and that includes political actions, too (Baudrillard 1993). Thus, there is no known possibility for any individual, including Baudrillard, to rebel against the sign system. This is why Baudrillard hesitated to put forward a political program. Also, in his later works, Baudrillard accords with Marx in capitalist society was governed by production during a certain period of time, there were class clashes, and that this forced society to develop. According to Baudrillard, however, society reached “the end of production” and thus the end of the Marxist research program and the Marxist worldview. Yet even if Marx is explicitly rejected in MoP, Baudrillard continues to work with problems that are common to Marxism. The effect of Baudrillard's abandonment of Marxism is that his investigation of a theory of value never gets down to particulars but remains a programmatic sketch. The value theory is located in a position that largely rejects historical materialism but that uses dialectics and Marxian economic concepts. This position can be debated, but it makes Baudrillard's edifice look fresh and contemporary—and possible to use for dialogue with thinkers from similar standpoints (see Karatani 2008; Engeström 2005).7 Their implosion makes concentrated and collective struggle impossibleNoys 12 --- Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Chichester (Benjamin Noys, 10-1-2012, "Forget Neoliberalism? Baudrillard, Foucault, And The Fate Of Political Critique" Volume 9, Number 3, 6-30-2016, http://www2.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-9_3/v9-3-noys.html)//jonah We might take Baudrillard as the negative side of this kind of thesis. In Baudrillard the implosion of the masses signals the destruction of class identity, but with no compensatory dynamic of the recomposition of new modes of struggle. Rather Baudrillard’s work functions as a seismograph of the tendencies of financialisation, registering the strategies and forms of abstraction in absolute and irrevocable form. In this way Baudrillard gives the lie to the ‘optimistic’ dismissals of the necessity of critique – which suppose that the fragmentation of capitalism unleashes centrifugal forces of disruption that open affirmative contestation and reconfiguration – and questions the necessary recomposition of a ‘negative dialectic’ of proletarian self-abolishing proposed by TC. He emerges then, in paradoxical and anomalous ways, as the signal figure of the capitalist tendencies of the last forty years. While not endorsing Baudrillard’s own variations of the strategy of catastrophe that he repetitively explored, I do want to suggest that his own hyperbolic model of anti-critique poses acutely the problem that we confront in the present moment. The prefigurative qualities of Baudrillard’s writing are, now, self-evident. They still leave us with the same problems they always posed. While there was always a sense of political critique operant within Baudrillard’s writing his choice to displace that through ‘transpolitical’ strategies of excess, the deliberate extermination of any forms of agency, and the invocation of intra-systemic forms of overloading, left any congruent activity hanging. Like many others Baudrillard seemed to have broken the dialectic of theory and practice implied by Marxist critique, or launched such a refined and tenuous sense of theory as practice that its impact seemed limited at best. In some ways the attraction of Baudrillard’s writing in the ‘polar night’ of the 1980s in particular was precisely the way its tone captured this sense of an etiolated ‘theoretical practice’ coupled to a sense of horror or doom (Noys, 2007). Implosion is fragmentary to collective movements --- that makes concentrated class revolt impossibleNoys 6 --- Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Chichester (Benjamin, 2006, Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard / Ballard, Ícone 9, 6-30-16, page 33)//jonah This process recalls Baudrillard's analysis of potlatch, the gift exchange of so-called 'primitive' societies, as a process of 'continual higher bidding in exchange' (1998: 194). The excess emerges out of the acceleration of this bidding beyond any hope of containment or return. In the same way Paul Sinclair's crime answers, and out-bids, both the failed crime of David Greenwood and the organised criminality of Wilder Penrose. It also conforms to Baudrillard's description of the terrorist act as 'at the same time a model of simulation, a micromodel flashing with a minimally real event and a maximal echo chamber' (1983: 114). It belongs to the order of simulation, as it will be spectacular and an object of media interest, as was Greenwood's original crime. Also, it functions as a micro-model of dissident resistance against the organisation of alterity: the 'real event' here being the eruption of a 'real' alterity. Finally, as an echo chamber, it expands beyond the immediate context of the novel as fiction, resonating in the mediascape of contemporary culture. What is also crucial is that Ballard does not actually describe this act; it remains a virtual future left in all its potential ambiguity. Rather than provide another representation of radical alterity, bringing the crime back into simulation, Ballard's novel marks its 'presence' in the form of an absence. The perfect crime of the murder of alterity and its simulation is 'matched' or out-bid by another crime that never occurs, and may not actually occur, in the fictional universe. This is very similar to the recent work of Baudrillard. Although he does not have the license of fiction for him the out-bidding of the perfect crime takes place in thought: '[o]ur only hope lies in a criminal and inhumane kind of thought' (2001: 61). The substance of Baudrillard's thought has, as we have seen, remained quite constant. Therefore I want to suggest that this 'criminal and inhumane kind of thought' for which he strives is rather more a question of form. Since what we might call Baudrillard's 'simulated sociology' (the last great work being Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976)), which at least mimicked existing academic forms, his work has increasingly been articulated through disruptive formal strategies. His use of aphorism, impressionistic or journalistic writing (the bête noir of academic writing), fragments, diaries, and so on, work towards a hypercritical writing, which is itself implosive or catastrophic. The reason for these strategies is, again, the refusal to simply stage or represent the 'indestructible Other'. Instead the fragmentary form of his work circulates around it, registering its destabilising and implosive effects through writing. This is Baudrillard game of seduction: seducing simulated alterity into contact with the distortive 'black hole' of radical alterity. The aff’s academic fixation with shocking or seemingly taboo tactics trades on past theory while locking in attachment to the current structure of the universityEagleton 3 [Terry, Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University, After Theory, 2003, Basic Books: New York, NY, p. 1-3] Many of the ideas of these thinkers remain of incomparable value. Some of them are still producing work of major importance. Those to whom the title of this book suggests that ‘theory’ is now over, and that we can all relievedly return to an age of pre-theoretical innocence, are in for a disappointment. There can be no going back to an age when it was enough to pronounce Keats delectable or Milton a doughty spirit, It is not as though the whole project was a ghastly mistake on which some merciful soul I AFTER THEORY has now blown the whistle, so that we can all return to whatever it was we were doing before Ferdinand de Saussure heaved over the horizon. If theory means a reasonably systematic reflection on our guiding assumptions, it remains as indispensable as ever. But we are living now in the aftermath of what one might call high theory, in an age which, having grown rich on the insights of thinkers like Althusser, Barthes and Derrida, has also in some ways moved beyond them. The generation which followed after these path-breaking figures did what generations which follow after usually do. They developed the original ideas, added to them, criticized them and applied them. Those who can, think up feminism or structuralism; those who can’t, apply such insights to Moby-Dick or The Cat in the Hat. But the new generation came up with no comparable body of ideas of its own. The older generation had proved a hard act to follow. No doubt the new century will in time give birth to its own clutch of gurus. For the moment, however, we are still trading on the past - and this in a world which has changed dramatically since Foucault and Lacan first settled to their typewriters. What kind of fresh thinking does the new era demand? Before we can answer this question, we need to take stock of where we are. Structuralism, Marxism, post-structuralism and the like are no longer the sexy topics they were. What is sexy instead is sex. On the wilder shores of academia, an interest in French philosophy has given way to a fascination with French kissing. In some cultural circles, the politics of masturbation exen far more fascination than the politics of the Middle East. Socialism has lost out to sado-masochism. Among students of culture, the body is an immensely fashionable topic, but it is usually the erotic body, not the famished one. There is a keen interest in coupling bodies, but not in labouring ones. Quietly-spoken middle-class students huddle diligently in libraries, at work on sensationalist subjects like vampirism and eye-gouging, cyborgs and porno movies. Nothing could be more understandable. To work on the literature of latex or the political implications of navel-piercing is to take literally the wise old adage that study should be fun. It is rather like writing your Master’s thesis on the comparative flavour of malt whiskies, or on the phenomenology of lying in bed all day. It creates a seamless continuity between the intellect and everyday life. There are advantages in being able to write your Ph.D. thesis without stirring from in front of the TV set. In the old days, rock music was a distraction from your studies; now it may well be what you are studying. Intellectual matters are no longer an ivory-tower affair, but belong to the world of media and shopping malls, bedrooms and brothels. As such, they re-join everyday life - but only at the risk of losing their ability to subject it to critique. Today, the old fogeys who work on classical allusions in Milton look askance on the Young Turks who are deep in incest and cyber-feminism. The bright young things who pen essays on foot fetishism or the history of the codpiece eye with suspicion the scrawny old scholars who dare to maintain that Jane Austen is greater than Jeffrey Archer. One zealous orthodoxy gives way to another. Whereas in the old days you could be drummed out of your student drinking club if you failed to spot a metonym in Robert Herrick, you might today be regarded as an unspeakable nerd for having heard of either metonyms or Herrick in the first place.This trivialization of sexuality is especially ironic. For one of the towering achievements of cultural theory has been to establish gender and sexuality as legitimate objects of study, as well as matters of insistent political importance. it is remarkable how intellectual life for centuries was conducted on the tacit assumption that human beings had no genitals. (Intellectuals also behaved as though men and women lacked stomachs. As the philosophcr Emmanuel Levinas remarked of Martin Heidegger’s rather lofty concept of Dasein, meaning the kind of existence peculiar to humn beings: ‘Dasein does not eat.’) Friedrich Nietzsche once commented that whenever anybody speaks crudely of a human being as a belly with two needs and a head with one, the lover of knowledge should listen carefully. In an historic advance, sexuality is now firmly established within academic life as one of the keystones of human culture. We have come to acknowledge that human existence is at least as much about fantasy and desire as it is about truth and reason. It is just that cultural theory is at present behaving rather like a celibate middle-aged professor who has stumbled absent-mindedly upon sex and is frenetically making up for lost time. Invoking simulacra is a capitalist ploy to distract from materialismSchwabach 3 --- Professor of Law and Director of Center for Global Legal Studies, Thomas Jefferson School of Law, J.D., University of California at Berkeley (Aaron, 2003, “Kosovo: Virtual War and International Law,” Law and Literature at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, 7-8-16, pages 1-21)//jonah Although this theme has attained the status of a cliche, one carefullydeveloped depiction is that in Joe Haldeman’s novel Forever Peace.78 The story’s protagonist, Julian Class, is a University of Texas professor and U.S. Army sergeant who spends ten days each month remotely operating a military robot metonymically (and ironically) called a soldierboy. Together Class and the soldierboy form a cyborg – a concept often linked in fiction and criticism with problems of identity. 79 Class, in the person of the soldierboy, fights against third-world guerrillas who, unlike him, are actually present. In one disturbing scene, he and his fellow soldiers discuss having killed two ten-year-old girls who fired upon the soldierboys.80 The girls could not have inflicted serious damage on the robot, and, of course, could not have injured Class or his fellow operators, who were far away and safe at the time. The scene could have been written in response to Baudrillard’s solipsistic view of virtual war as nothing more than non-intersecting simulacra – for Baudrillard, the simulacral war that the “Americans” experienced never mirrored that experienced by Saddam Hussein: “[T]he two adversaries did not even confront each other face to face, the one lost in its virtual war won in advance, the other buried in its traditional war lost in advance.”81 Haldeman’s reader, however, is left with the horrified awareness that, while Class’s war is a simulacrum, the little girl’s death is real. Inhabiting worlds of simulacra is a luxury enjoyed by academics from wealthy countries, like Jean Baudrillard and Julian Class, one of whom may be no more and no less real than the other. Those who actually risk death in war, though, enjoy no such luxury, but must believe in the reality of war and their own existence Directory: rest -> wikis -> openev -> spaces -> 2017 -> pages -> Michigan7 -> attachments pages -> Utnif topicality 2017 Download 1.09 Mb. Share with your friends:
|