Kenneth Rufo // Jan 22nd 2007 at 6:20 pm Nice paper. I think that if I disagree, it’s with two moments in the text, and that there’s a few obvious consequences that follow.
First, I tend to think that Baudrillard is more segmented than you appear to, or than Hegarty does, and so I don’t think the Code corresponds to the more current work on globalization. I think the Code is the name or manifestation of the model stage of simulation - the third stage - but that now we live, according to Baudrillard, in a fourth stage, alternately known as viral or fractal, or more recently, integral reality. In the fourth stage, meaning has reached such a wanton and pervasive integration that there is no longer any distinction between the simulacral and the real; everything is realized, usually in real time. And I don’t think it’s fair to say, as Hegarty does, that symbolic exchange has simply been renamed with small adjustments over time. Such a view lends a convenient consistency to Baudrillard, but misses the performative dimension of Baudrillard’s many and varied attempts to determine an alternative to the problem he identifies, and of particular import, misses the significant role played by the change in Baudrillard’s writing style after Symbolic Exchange and Death. Fatal theorizing, radical theorizing, the lucidity pact - these later efforts correspond with changes in how he sees and articulates the problem of simulation in a variety of contexts (globalization, technology, cloning, media, politics). Symbolic exchange is tied to the “gift,” which was a very trendy concept back when, but which has only a passing role to play in the more recent work, when the question is about the gift _of singularity_ - the point being it’s not the ambiguity of the gift that makes its exchange so difficult (which is a way that exchange can be understood when simulacra are still predicated on models of interpretation, meaning, and value-production, as there is no model that corresponds to ambivalence and the gift - other than the theory of the gift and symbolic exchange *grin* and the academic structure upon which it is predicated) but rather the interruption of a singularity in an other wise totally realized environment, which is where the emphasis must be if we’re to understand a response to the current stage of viral or integral reality.
Second, I disagree with your reading of the penultimate scene in You and Me and Everyone Else I know - I think it’s more than possible to read his terror not as his knowledge that love is impossible - but actually the opposite. So much of the film is about him trying to project a need or an image of self that to find this woman who seems completely into him, well, terror as ec-stasis seems a perfectly appropriate response. A minor disagreement, but still. Kenneth Rufo // Jan 22nd 2007 at 7:37 pm For me, I’ve always thought Baudrillard can be understood as a kind of perfect blend of McLuhan and Heidegger, with inflections of Bataille and Lacan and Mauss and others, but it’s from those first two that he gets his close attention to mediation as a means of informing his analytic of the current scene. Which isn’t to say he’s necessarily writing about mediation, but he’s trying to figure out how contemporary media helps us to make sense of all these other developments in theory and history and politics and whatnot, as well as with media. So I tend to think that any attempt to come away from Baudrillard with the idea of some stable concept - like Hegarty does with symbolic exchange - misses the fundamental point that all of Baudrillard’s failed strategies attempts to enumerate: namely that it is their failure, and the constant attempt to outwit the subject (and “its” object), despite the constant failure, that is his greatest lesson for success. But if you try to take one concept and transcend its particular conditions, you miss out on the means by which each necessary failure responds to his growing insights into the general problem of mediation.
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