Hi everyone!
So in re-visiting Baudrillard this weekend with the help of Aniko’s notes, I definitely think I understand his argument a bit better. I’d love to discuss him in relation to the readings for this week a bit more in class today, so here are just a few of my questions/preliminary observations (by no means is this an exhaustive list):
1) Baudrillard’s theory shifts the focus away from Marxist theories of production towards consumerism. In what ways can we consider his work a theory for post-industrial societies?
2) Baudrillard’s emphasis on a self-regulating system of objects and desires seems to disavow any possibilities for resistant appropriations (in the cultural studies sense). I think that Canclini provides a necessary corrective to Baudrillard in this respect, for while Baudrillard improved on Marx by shifting the emphasis from producer to consumer, Canclini provides a model in which he imagines a communication circuit between producers and consumers.
3) In looking again at Baudrillard, I find a fundamental contradiction in his essay between his emphasis on communicative systems of objects and ideological control and his notions of sign play and slippage. How can he invoke Claude Levi Strauss’s structural approach on one hand and Derrida (at least implicitly) on the other? In my opinion, Canclini brings Baudrillard one step further by more specifically articulating how commodities as codes can be used in the process of communication, citizenship, and identity/community formation (and without Baudrillard’s apocalyptic tone). Canclini’s critique of postmodernism halfway through his essay seems almost like a direct refutation of Baudrillard’s later work. (In my opinion, I don’t think “Consumer Society” is purely postmodern just yet….)
4) Trentmann’s article on the relationship between consumerism and modernity seems to provide a historical refutation to Baudrillard and Marx’s conception.
I completely agree on wanting to talk more about this in class today, as throughout the readings I was thinking about the relationship to Consumer Society - though I somewhat disagree about the necessary corrective in the sense that I think Baudrillard implicitly includes a communication circuit between producers and consumers that is simply more slotted towards production of needs and the interaction of consumers with those systems, while Canclini, in my mind, seems to give a hollow overall model of interaction. I think the strongest point of Canclini's article comes in discussing certain exceptions, rather than the general model (which makes sense, given the research done in indiginous villages), whereas for Baudrillard that seems to be reversed.
ReplyDeleteSimilarly, I think the model Canclini suggests on how commodities can be used as codes in communication/citizenship/etc is similarly empty in that it simply says "if things are done this way, look at the good that can happen" rather than expressing changes that may need to occur (either structurally or mentally) to bring that about - and an inability to make those changes is, in my mind, why Baudrillard has an apocalyptic tone, as he seems to see the changes as negative and largely irreversible.