Baudrillard

I thought that Ken Rufo’s lecture was great. I liked how he used real world examples to explain the ideas he was discussing, it made me understand him so much more. I also like learning about Baudrillard because I had known very little about him. I thought it was interesting to see how he started out criticizing structural Marxism only a little bit and as his ideas progressed he started to criticize him even more.
I understood the four simulation stages that Baudrillard wrote about. When Ken talked about them I understood them because of his great examples. I got that the first stage is standing in for reality When he talked about the cow and the hay and how eventually if you replace their value for money you don’t need to trade you can just buy what you need but then stage two comes in and the value you assigned is not always going to be the same all the time. Here simulation hides the absence of reality. His example of the stock market was also a good one even though I usually don’t understand the stock market I did grasp what he was saying! The third stage then produces its own reality. Here he got into simulacrum, which he said means a copy without an original, which is what we had been discussing in class recently. His examples here of the ET ride or Epcot not only made me laugh but it made me understand exactly what this means. You are made to believe that what you are seeing in these places is the real thing when in fact it is just a copy of nothing that’s actually real. The hyperreal that Baudrillard talks about made perfect sense as well. It’s when, “the real you discover will always be an effect of the simulation, a copy or non-copy of it,” because you will always see the simulation as really correct. Baudrillard then adds a fourth stage he calls “integral reality.” It is where simulation is everywhere without models and means everything and nothing all at once. Ken explains it using credit and virtual banking. He says you can buy something on a credit card and the money is automatically taken out of your account. You never see this actually happen though so you don’t realize what you are spending. The fact he put about how much debt Americans are in really shocked me. But it totally made sense to his point about capitalism being about the consumption and not the production.
At the beginning of his lecture he talks about how Baudrillard added sign value to structural Marxism. Structural Marxism talks about things in terms of its use-value and what the object does or its exchange value. Baudrillard felt that this was a too limited way to look at things. He wants to look at what the object represents and make this more important then the above mentioned ways structural Marxism looks at objects. I thought it interesting as well how Baudrillard feels that theorists say they discovered something new when in fact they invented or created the model for which this so called discovery has come from. I agree with him here I feel that a lot of theorists want to complicate matters and do so by saying they discovered a loop hole in someone else’s work when they just made up the whole basis in the first place.
I thought this was a great lecture as I said in the beginning. I really liked his examples and I thought Baudrillard was a different kind of theorist. He was not trying to say he knew it all like I get from some of the others we have read. He is relating things to life and attacking things that just don’t make sense to him and gives reason to back it up. I thought it was a refreshing read!