Chapter 3, “Narratives of Primitivism”

Cultural extermination can result from "museumification" … or demuseumification" (…) the theme park exists to hide the fact that the "outside" world is of the same order … (46)

Bataille argues that the improvement of the workers' conditions is a failure truly to separate masters and workers in an excessive display of expenditure/destruction. This leads to a reduction in the stature and pleasure of the master until, under a general state of apathy, the whole system can only move forwards again with a spectacular uprising of the workers. Class struggle can thus be interpreted as having the symbolic weight of exchange in potlatching societies. (50)

Derrida examines the founding binary oppositions of metaphysics and argues that the excluded side of each binary opposition is actually implicit within metaphysics all along. Therefore, metaphysical arguments must contain blind spots or "aporias" where certain excluded binaries cannot be seen or accounted for by those same arguments. (56)

[Compare this with:]

Marxism cannot see beyond production. This is why it is a "blind spot." (77) [What is/are the binary oppositions that depend on "production"?]

Popular deconstruction focuses on the hierarchies implicit in systems built upon binary oppositions (e.g. good/bad, male/female), and normally aims at a reversal of them. Philosophical deconstruction argues that the reversal is a temporary, strategic move that doesn't really take us "outside" of metaphysics, because the hierarchical system has merely been reorganized (hierarchy is still in place). Popular deconstruction regards this reversal as far more radical and liberating, going beyond closed, formal systems. (57)

If, on the other hand, he 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)

Contemporary society turns all objects into commodities, which circulate endlessly like signs: thus objects lose the inherent value they "once" had, … (58)

…Baudrillard regards the symbolic as something that is not a structure, but an act or process that "heals" divisions within society. (60)

[In The Consumer Society] Intersubjective communication is replaced with the interaction of humans, goods and whole systems that surround the manipulation of these goods. (…) [In an earlier era] … it was timeless objects, instruments or monuments which outlived the generations of human beings." [cf. Benjamin's "aura"?]

Chapter 4, “Reworking Marxism”

Under the traditional Marxist analysis of alienation, consumer goods are necessarily divorced from production. (69) (…) this subtle shift from alienation to increased expectation. (70) * due to increase in purchasing power of the workers

The processes of consumption are experienced therefore as magical, partly because the signs of happiness have replaced "real," total satisfaction, and because those signs are used to invoke the endlessly deferred arrival of total satisfaction" (71 - cf. cargo cults) (…) In both instances - television and the cargo cult - a social group watch another group consuming more objects, only to confirm their belief in future abundance and happiness. (71)

[Universality of the news item:] What he means by this is that reality is both made spectacular and distant at the same time: the subject is brought seemingly closer to the world of events, but this world is consumed via signs, which keep the real at a distance. (71)

For example, Baudrillard doesn’t think that people are forced somehow to want a particular product, say a new car. Rather, there is a whole system of needs, which is the product of the system of production (1998b: 74). (72)

[How the system of needs is produced, as opposed to specific needs related to specific instances of production: list on p. 73]

Rather, human beings now exist within a system of consumption where the act of buying a product is as abstract as the ways in which the products are made in the first place [on the assembly line etc.] (74)

… it (the consumed object) functions like the Saussurean sign: differentially and arbitrarily. (75) [see quote on the same page]

What is the solution, then, if consumption is to be elucidated? (…) This is to be done not merely by arguing that there is no such thing as the object (because we deal with the object as sign) but that there is also no such thing as the individual. (…) the individual subject is preceded by the social system (76)

[On opposition between concrete, qualitative labor on one hand and abstract, quantitative labor on the other:] We then (as Marxists) read back into pre-Capitalist modes of production the notions of concrete, real, qualitative labour, and lose sight of the fact that all of these notions derive from our later abstract system. (79) [see quote at the bottom of the same page]

Symbolic wealth … is non-teleological and non-productive (80)

With the universalization of Marxist concepts, Baudrillard argues that there is a threefold result: the concepts cease to be analytical and become "religious" or mystical; the concepts take on a scientific cast; the concepts become representative of reality/truth, not interpretive. (81)

"There is neither a mode of production nor production in primitive societies. There is no dialectic and no unconscious in primitive societies. These concepts analyze our own societies, which are ruled by political economy. (…)” (1975:49) [Here] the point is that, in bringing Marxist thought up against an alien Other, Marxism is shown to be a local phenomenon, if one of great explanatory power, not a set of universals.”(81)

“Watergate. Same scenario as Disneyland (an imaginary effect concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the artificial parameter) … ([Simulations,] 1983b:26).” (85)

[The scandal at Watergate was, to Baudrillard, in the cover-up which was meant to deny a peep into what government was always like and not only in the Watergate case.]

Three orders of simulation end up in the third order, in which “we no longer even have the real as part of the equation.” (87)

The “hyperreal doesn’t exist in the realm of good and evil.” (86)

Simulacra of God suggest that “God himself has only ever been his own simulacrum” (1983b:8). (89)

“Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America, which is Disneyland … Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America sourrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation.” (1983b: 25) (89)

The moral front of capitalism, which is immoral (unconcerned with good and evil) is regenerated through the hyperreal both in Disneyland and at Watergate (91). Explain.

“… the media … in May 1968 … a kind of divorce from language and actions that can change the world … the media had already entered the world of third-order simulation, where it didn’t matter if it represented revolution as a good or bad thing, or even if it portrayed the events as truly revolutionary or simply a temporary student uprising (even given the associated strikes, etc.).” (92)

How are the war in Vietnam and Francis Copola’s Apocalypse Now “cut of the same cloth?” (1994a:60) (93) [The useless expenditure, destruction of the environment, etc. take place in both. Destruction and production are interchangeable in both – in the case of war economic aid follows, in the case of the film destruction of the environment was done in order to produce the film]

How do Lyotard and Baudrillard differ in their attitude to the postmodern? [To Lyotard it opens up possibilities, to Baudrillard it closes them. To L. the postmodern is a utopian space “where people can creatively leap from one knowledge domain to another.” (94-5). The models for producing “creative” knowledge are, according to B., controlled by governments and media groups.]

“The Gulf War Did Not Take Place:” 1) it was a virtual war where action followed simulation by software but conventional war did not in reality take place (96-7); 2) this argument assumes that there is a reality still – it’s absurdity is the result of Baudrillard being a performer as well as a critic of hyperreality. (97) [His claims are sometimes absurd, which one accepts in a performance, where absurdity reveals a “reality.”]

In reality TV “there is no longer a third, normative position of realistic perspective.” (98) Postmodern spaces such as suburbs with their hypermarkets are characterized by the interchangeability of positions – they’re the same everywhere (cf. Adorno and Horkheimer) – a collapse of perspectival space. (99)

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle:

“All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.” (1998: para. 1, 12) (99)

This suggests a relationship to Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum. But B. wants to go beyond Debord, who still differentiates between the real and its representation in spectacle.

[Cf. Bakhtin’s work on carnival and Lane/B’s point that in Debord the spectacle is the opposite of dialogue (1998: para 18, 17) (100)]

“… in hyperreality the subject is no longer “alienated” or “repressed” in the Marxist sense that we find in Debord.” Explain in the context of what Lane says on p. 100. [Because hyperreality is not a fake reality to which real life is opposed, people don’t live in a reality separate from hyperreality.]