[-empyre-] Baudrillard, Inutility and the End of Value - forward from David Teh

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

Another rejected post this time from our mysterious server before it  
even got to moderation.  Maybe the server thought it was a  
simulation.  -Apologies to David, and here is his comment:

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Subject: Baudrillard, Inutility and the End of Value
From: dt <david.teh@arts.usyd.edu.au>

dear empyrialists,

some rough reflections on the recent exchanges... i'm sorry i've not  
had time to follow it all closely. but i was very interested in the  
exchange between Ken and Geert, which succeeded in bypassing the  
typical squabbles over legacy in favour of the futurity announced by  
this thread's title, and which JB's unique brand of speculative  
theory has done so much to stimulate.

i'm also pleased that Danny and others have raised questions about  
JB's utility and inutility, and his appeal to different audiences  
(Theorists vs Artists, e.g.). i'm not sure why, but i suspect it  
bodes well for his memory that, even in death, he remains a  
singularly difficult thinker to consign to generic/disciplinary  
pigeonholes. i found it hard to make sense of this singularity  
without noting a few pivotal points in his oeuvre around which  
several quite different Baudrillards crystallise.

in my own research, i tried to characterise his 'turn' in two ways  
(merely two of many - intellectual history, i think, ought to be  
catholic in its characterisations of such figures, if it is to wring  
maximal relevance out of them): first as a turn towards a kind of  
sovereign writing (after Bataille); and second, as a pataphysical  
turn. but i stressed (and this sort of responds to Danny's comment  
about theory as an 'aesthetic' enterprise) that this 'pataphysical'  
should be considered not simply an aesthetic position (which
spirals outward unto literary excess, the Ubu-Nietzsche  
constellation, etc), but also a critical, political one (which draws  
the system it resembles inwards, unto demonstration of the latter's  
'fatality', perversity and so on).

<snip (from my thesis)>
'Fatal' theory, like the écriture pursued by Bataille, names a kind  
of sovereign writing, giving rise to intensities, to poesis, rather  
than explicit, factual knowledge... Without function, without  
meaning, without message, its ends and its means are not severable.  
This fundamental ambivalence is, for Baudrillard, the means "by which  
the symbolic moves beyond signification."(Genosko)
<unsnip>

i like Gary's phrase here because it underscores the ambivalent  
relation between the two types of expression: the symbolic is a kind  
of signification, but one that exceeds communication in any  
instrumentalist sense of the word. were we not avoiding total  
characterisations here, this exacerbation of communication could  
almost serve as a metaphor for JB's singular contribution (a la Rex  
Butler's designation of his 'maximalism').

notwithstanding his much-vaunted dismissals of (most) contemporary  
art, his thought has remained, and continues to remain, relevant to  
the artworld. why? perhaps because the demise of abstraction (in some  
sense a seductive strategy opposed to the excessive realisms of the  
Spectacle, the media, and most art) in the world generally, was never  
quite completed in art. there was always some art around that staked  
its existence on the ineffable.

someone here put the affinity between JB and artists in terms of an  
alignment of purpose - or rather, as a teacher of mine once defined  
art, of "purposefulness without purpose". it was Adorno, i think  
(Minima Moralia?) who said that the task of the artist was to  
introduce chaos into order, and this is perhaps not a bad description  
of what JB does to the (discursive) pigeonholing process(es).

his uneven popularity amongst different readerships doubtless has a  
lot to do with the shift in his publishing formats away from the  
academic and towards the aphoristic. (and i agree that semiotexte -  
with a format intermediate on that spectrum - had a big impact there.  
another good example would be 'Revenge of the Crystal', an adroitly  
themed edition of excerpts that had a potent influence on my own  
reading of him).

i wouldn't go so far as to suggest that artists and artschool-types  
were confined to the later "sociological diaries". (i note, e.g.,  
that 'The System of Objects' has been making a come-back in these  
contexts.) but it's probably fair to say that artworld readers of JB  
(certainly those in my orbit) have tended to be much less familiar  
with 'For a Critique', 'Symbolic Exchange' and 'The Mirror' than they  
are with 'Simulations', 'America' and 'Cool Memories n' (despite all  
my ranting!-).

beyond that, i'd venture an additional, perhaps deeper explanation  
for the affinity: that artists are people who make a living from  
their ideas, from intellectual property. in the 20th Century at  
least, good ones (irrespective of discipline) have needed to be more  
and more aware of what media technology did to their bread'n'butter.  
as early as the mid-70s, JB was talking about an era in which  
production had entirely given way to reproduction. (at the time, an  
avant garde was still trying to run away from the commodity form and  
the museum.) now however repetitive contemporary art's cycles have  
seemed to become, few would dispute the fact that in the digital era,  
the game has changed considerably, and
that JB has been a pretty reliable guide to the new galaxy (in a  
tradition that would take in Benjamin, maybe McLuhan...). some  
commentators have mistaken his critique of the informationalisation  
of the world as a relentlessly melancholic assessment of life after  
culture. but his awareness of the strange fortunes of intellectual  
property was penetrating from the very beginning.

i have always thought that the key to his extraordinary valency  
across the disciplinary (and non-disciplined) spectrum lay in his  
critique of use value ('72-'76 being the pivotal years imho), utility  
having been a presumption that the human/social sciences imported  
(however hazily) from economic thought and could never quite face up  
to. with this in mind, i prefer not to isolate the pataphysical JB  
from the sociologue, philosophe, whatever else he was.

if anyone's interested, here below are some further snippings from my  
thesis on the subjects gazetted above. (mostly from Chapter 4:  
"Symbolic Exchange and the End of Value".)

best,
dt

__________________________

<thesis again>
... What often goes uninterrogated, like a sort of reality principle  
of value, is the very question of the thing's utility. The economist  
needs use value because it attests to the rationality of exchange.  
The Marxist needs it to express the inchoate positivity - to which no  
one can claim to be a stranger - of having a thing,... the enjoyment  
of use. There must be something more than exchange value, some  
alternative. Utility guarantees the existence, and the priority, of a  
sphere before and beyond the market. ('What was the
thing worth before its Fall into venality?') But while necessary to  
both systems of analysis, it is rarely what is in dispute between  
them. And this is why Baudrillard's intervention is so apposite.

The only value that matters to our knowledge economists and creative  
industrialists is exchange value. No one mentions the lacuna of use  
value. That culture is value, that it is the new value, is accepted  
by almost everyone. But cultural values are immaterial; they are  
exchanged like signs or language - as information; they are not  
consumed by use. Informational commodities collapse the whole use  
value / exchange value schema. It is ironic, therefore, that the  
informational capitalists - agribusiness, software and entertainment  
entrepreneurs - are the only ones still trying to prop it up. How  
does one
use a cultural object? The theory of design has long faced this  
question, hence its affinity with new economy objects (e.g.  
software), which are also constellated around the user.

But if this user is a figure that objects are produced for, it is  
also a figure which they produce, and which, setting objects into  
play in the field of values, further produces them. Nowhere is this  
more evident than in the redundant plumage of portable and wearable  
electronic devices, the software and the content they propagate, all  
carefully engineered and customised for an aestheticised, if not  
completely gratuitous, functionality. [And what is this if not a  
"science of imaginary solutions"(Jarry)]
...
The point is not to abandon the real in favour of farce, but rather  
to show that the technoscientific real is itself farcical, and  
respond in kind. (Debord: "The
parodic-serious expresses the contradictions of an era in which the  
greatest seriousness advances masked in the ambiguous interplay  
between art and its negation." ) Baudrillard's pataphysical  
ambivalence, stemming from a deconstruction of utility and function,  
demanded that he do away with value as an analytic category altogether.

... [From here, he] could pose the problem of production on a horizon  
other than
the materialist one, one where the finality of produce, the end of  
production, is nothing more than the generation and recycling of  
exchange values (just as the production of meaning relies on a  
recycling of semiotic values). And from this perspective it makes  
sense to take cultural values as exemplary - those symbolic values  
which simply circulate, which are not exhausted by 'use'; non- 
functional things like art, fashion, and information; things that  
proliferate according not to a mode of production, but to the code of  
reproduction. Theories of the arts provide an acute perspective here,  
accustomed
as they are to interpreting symbolic and traditional codes, and  
attuned to the logic of reproduction which has so transformed them  
and so threatened their objects, their schemas of value.

I have thus opened up a breach between the notions of reading  
Baudrillard and of using him. And yet utility, the target of so much  
of his critique in the key texts, still affords a perspective on his  
thought. If Baudrillard theorises the object 'beyond use value' then  
we should consider his own theory as just such an object - that is,  
bring the collapse of the bourgeois and Marxist schema of value to  
bear upon his own literary production?
...
His project is anti-metaphysical, a philosophy, in the words of  
Deleuze and Guattari, that "does not consist in knowing and is not  
inspired by truth. Rather, it is categories like Interesting,  
Remarkable, or Important that determine [its] success or failure."
...


--
Dr David Teh
Independent Curator/Writer/Teacher
Bangkok, Thailand
m. +66 (0)84 673 7178
e. david.teh@arts.usyd.edu.au
w. bangkokok.typepad.com/platform | www.halfdozen.org