Four brilliant passages, courtesy of your favorite French sociologist.
On the relationship between the Imaginary and the Object:
We may take comfort in the fact that even if objects sometimes escape practical human control, they never escape the imagination. Modes of the imaginary follow modes of technological evolution, and it is therefore to be expected that the next mode of technical efficiency will give rise to a new imaginary mode. At present, its traits are difficult to discern, but perhaps, in the wake of the animistic and energetic modes, we shall need to turn our attention to the structures of a cybernetic imaginary mode whose central myth will no longer be that of an absolute organicism, nor that of an absolute functionalism, but instead that of an absolute interrelatedness of the world. (The System of Objects, 118)
On the ordinal structure of the sign and commodity relationship:
It is because the structure of the sign is at the very heart of the commodity form that the commodity can take on, immediately, the effect of signification—not epiphenomenally, in excess of itself, as ‘message’ or connotation—but because its very form establishes it as a total medium, as a system of communication administering all social exchange. Like the sign form, the commodity is a code managing the exchange of values. It makes little difference whether the contents of material production or the immaterial contents of signification are involved; it is the code that is determinant: the rules of the interplay of signifiers and exchange value. (For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 146)
On the Real and Nostalgia:
The transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing marks a decisive turning point. The first reflects a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notion of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates the era of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer a God to recognize his own, no longer a Last Judgment to separate the false from the true, the real from its artificial resurrection, as everything is already dead and resurrected in advance.When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a plethora of myths of origin and of signs of reality - a plethora of truth, of secondary objectivity, and authenticity. Escalation of the true, of lived experience, resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. Panic-stricken production of the real and of the referential, parallel to and greater than the panic of material production: this is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us - a strategy of the real, of the neoreal and the hyperreal that everywhere is a strategy of deterrence. (Simulacra and Simulation, 6-7)
And finally, on politics and power:
That each should have his or her portion of the 'accursed share' is the democratic principle. But it seems the 'citizens' do not really want to submit to this sovereign obligation and they are afraid of their own arbitrary power. It will, then, be devoted to a few - these will be the politicians, who themselves most often have only one idea: to give it away. You have only to see them redistributing power in every possible way - on the one hand, to prove themselves that they have it, and, on the other, to ensure that no one escapes it, for those who refuse it are dangerous. 'If I knew,' said Canetti, 'that there still are on this earth some human beings without any power I would say that nothing is lost.' The great danger for the very existence of politics is not that human beings should compete to take power, but that they should not want it. (The Transparency of Evil, or The Lucidity Pact, 166).
Some questions that might follow:
- How does the code that "signs" the commodity form get written?
- Is it possible to have a theory of ideology that accounts for simulation? What would this theory of ideology look like?
- How might the Imaginary be structured in an age increasingly defined by the virtual?
- Is Lacanian psychoanalysis a symptom or a prescription, or both? Is it, in other words, evidence of a nostalgia for the Real?
- Can there be a politics of refusal? What would it look like?
Comments (1)
Ah, yes, Baudrillard says so much better what I was trying to convey to my students about new media (see my previous comment on the Thaumaturgy post) -- on that first quote. That new imaginary mode I talked about in class as part of what new media "means." And yet, not altogether new. The printing press at its inception revolutionized the world perhaps as much with the new imaginary that emerged, and it was an imaginary of new media.
Posted by Nathaniel I. Cordova | December 22, 2006 11:04 PM
Posted on December 22, 2006 23:04