Baudrillard Pt2 for tonight
Got into a quick chat with a colleague after work tonight about the early days of the internet, and how people we now see as pioneers were at one point viewed as ‘computer criminals’. Somehow we got onto new media and capitalism and I talked about ‘capitalism as a code we can’t break’, thinking myself very original. Of course, Baudrillard was there first:
A revolution has occured in the capitalist world without our Marxists having wanted to comprehend it… This mutation concerns the passage from the form-commodity to the form-sign, from the abstraction of the exchange of material products under the law of general equivalance to the operationalization of all exchanges under the law of the code.
Quoted in ‘Baudrillard: A Critical Reader’, by Douglas Kellner, p.168. Tonight was obviously meant for a reflection on the hyperreal.
Baudrillard’s Postmodern Media Theory
Back in 2005 I wrote an article on hyperreality and arrogance for a website set up by some Masters-level peers at Oxford, where I used an old colleague’s arrogance as the example to explain Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality, something I taught during Magazine Theory classes at Middlesex Uni. I was reminded of it tonight while reading Anais Nin’s diaries from 1935, when she meets her brother Thorvald off the boat at New York harbour. She interprets his hard outer shell as a cover for his sensitivity at meeting for the first time in ten years, but then says ‘but i always interpret people’s shells in this way, and many times I have been proved wrong’. She has got it wrong, she later admits. And I guess I’ve been wrong about this, too (whenever I say ‘I guess’ I know that I’m making it easier for myself to admit something), so I need to apologise to that old friend. Luckily he’s on Facebook. It is often the easiest way to interpret those who come across as offhand or not in tune with your own outward facing identity. I got it wrong over the last couple of days with a close friend, who I felt wasn’t giving me enough support over an issue. Sometimes picking up media theory and using it to analyse interpersonal relationships can be a tricky business. Read more
