Summary of Jean Baudrillard's Symbolic Exchange and Death (Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society)

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 The first aspect of the exchange of terms in the langue is related to the structural dimension of language, and the second to its functional dimension. Each dimension is separate but linked, which is what makes the classical configuration of the linguistic sign under the rule of the commodity law of value so unique.

#2 The law of value is revolutionized in such a way that the two aspects are completely separated. Referential value is eliminated, and the structural play of value becomes autonomous. The systems of reference for production, signification, the affect, substance, and history are all replaced with a structural dimension.

#3 The end of the classical era of the sign, the end of the era of production, and the end of the exchange-value/use-value dialectic, which is the only thing that makes accumulation and social production possible.

#4 The era of simulation is visible everywhere in society. It is legible in the commutability of formerly contradictory terms, such as the beautiful and the ugly in fashion, the left and the right in politics, and the true and the false in media messages.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Apr 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669394501

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Insights on Jean Baudrillard's Symbolic Exchange and Death (Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society)

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The first aspect of the exchange of terms in the langue is related to the structural dimension of language, and the second to its functional dimension. Each dimension is separate but linked, which is what makes the classical configuration of the linguistic sign under the rule of the commodity law of value so unique.

#2

The law of value is revolutionized in such a way that the two aspects are completely separated. Referential value is eliminated, and the structural play of value becomes autonomous. The systems of reference for production, signification, the affect, substance, and history are all replaced with a structural dimension.

#3

The end of the classical era of the sign, the end of the era of production, and the end of the exchange-value/use-value dialectic, which is the only thing that makes accumulation and social production possible.

#4

The era of simulation is visible everywhere in society. It is legible in the commutability of formerly contradictory terms, such as the beautiful and the ugly in fashion, the left and the right in politics, and the true and the false in media messages.

#5

The critique of political economy begins with social production, which is the mode of production. The concept of production alone allows us to extract a surplus value that controls the rational dynamics of capital as well as its beyond, the revolution.

#6

If the revolution is to be about the social and generic production of man, then there is no longer any prospect of a revolution since there is no more production. If capital is a form of social domination, then we are always in its midst.

#7

The loss of reference affected the revolutionary systems of reference, which can no longer be found in any social substance of production or in the certainty of a reversal in any truth of labour power. Labour is no longer a unique, historical praxis that gives rise to unique social relations. It is now part of contemporary life, and it is no longer even the suffering of historical prostitution that fulfills an unrelenting desire.

#8

The end of the religious autonomization of production means that we can see that all of this could have been produced recently, but with completely different goals than the internal finalities.

#9

To analyze production as a code cuts across both the material evidence of machines, factories, labor time, the product, salaries, and money, and the more formal evidence of surplus-value, the market, to discover the rule of the game which is to destroy the logical network of the agencies of capital.

#10

Labour power is not a power but a definition. It is an axiom that underlies the labour process, and its real operation is only the reduplication of this definition in the operation of the code. It is at the level of the sign, never at the level of energy, that violence is fundamental.

#11

The current trend of trying to re-enrich labour is just another example of how society is trying to re-integrate people into its structure of absorption. Labour power is no longer sold brutally, but rather it is marketed, designed, and turned into a commodity.

#12

The entire sphere of production, labor and the forces of production, must be conceived as collapsing into the sphere of consumption,