Jean Baudrillard's "Symbolic Exchange & Death" (Part 3)

[@JAMAICADOCK]

Baudrillard puts into words things you sense but can't quite put your finger on. And sometimes you get the feeling Baudrillard himself is struggling to express the inexpressible which is often read as psychobabble by his critics. However, when panning for gold, you've got to wade through a lot of worthless rocks and sludge. And Baudrillard from time to time, hits the motherlode, that is by digging under the cliches of modernity - the overload of information, the threat of technology, the growing superficiality of culture - to get to what's really going on under the surface, .or to tell us that the surface is really all that now exists..

[@kostaborojevic498]

Very well put my friend.

[@Shane-zo4mg]

Thank you sir. I bought the book. Ready to start my year/semester of reading

[@LukePalmer]

Thank you for this series!

[@hyperrealhandgrenade6578]

Can you tell me more about why you see Baudrillard as an optimistic thinker? My understanding (from SEP) is that in this book he is optimistic about the possibility of change, but in his later works he becomes more pessimistic and cynical, and advocates using one's gnostic understanding of signs to play 3D chess with the world.

[@TheoryPhilosophy]

Well the fact that there can be a duel (in the form of chess) at all excites him. His big worry was that the world would dip into a kind of new world order totalizing system and so all antagonism would be conjured away. He maintains, all the way to the end, that the possibility of seduction, the duel, symbolic exchange, and singularity are inviolable. It's in that way that he is optimistic.

[@hyperrealhandgrenade6578]

@@TheoryPhilosophy Okay so you're saying that he says we will never be able to overthrow the system and replace it with another one, but we will always be able to live out an alternative. Is that right? If so, it reminds me of Augistine's City of God/City of Man, and I wonder what connections could be made there.

[@TheoryPhilosophy]

Kind of. He says that the system of hyperreality (or the simulacrum, whatever) will never be able to completely put the illusion of the world to death (he likes illusion, mystery, symbolic exchange, antagonism, etc, btw)

[@kostaborojevic498]

We will never replace capitalism with another system, it would be pretty naiv to believe that. It will suicide itself and we may go with it probably duo to climate change etc.

[@OjoRojo40]

Why is the sound quality so bad in this one??? Thanks for the video.

[@TheoryPhilosophy]

Ya I wasn't quite as consistent with making sure all my wires were plugged in back in the day, lol.

[@kostaborojevic498]

Nice as always. But pretty hard to grasp.