I enjoyed Ken's entire post; I found it easy to understand, and it was a constant, steady flow, laying out different ideas and showing how they relate to one another. The part of the post I especially enjoyed was when he was talking about how different critical theorists simply invented these theories and concepts, they didn't actually discover them like something scientific.
I don't know how right I am about this, but I think that Baudrillard and Derrida would have some similiar thoughts about this. Derrida says every structure can be decentered, thus there are no stable or fixed truths. And when Ken was summarizing Baudrillard's thoughts on the Marxist idea of the commodity and the concepts of use-value and exchange-value, Derrida popped into my head and I immediately connected this idea with Derrida's that there cannot be any fixed truths. Baudrillard does not was to rescue reality, in fact it seems like he thinks this would be foolish or near impossible, that instead we should focus on rescuing illusion and keeping illusion alive. Wouldn't this relate to Derrida who believes we also must not focus on rescuing the real because the real isn't possible, that this all is an illusion? Lacan even, saying that if we ever reached the real we would be in a state of traumatic shock. These theorists invent these concepts to better explain our situation as human beings. That we must question and be curious about what happens around us, we cannot simply just take things how they are.
Our capitialist society is a good example of this. What I probably found the most interesting part of Ken's post was his comment on the 200 something trillion dollars American owe in credit. That is A LOT of consumer debt, and this is what keeps our country going. This fake, monopoly money is what makes up our country and makes us so strong and powerful. But this money is just an illusion. We consume therefore we are.
I also liked how Ken compared structuralism and Saussure's ideas about signs and the signified and signifier and related this to use-value and exchange-value. It really helped me looked at currency and its system in a new way, in a frightening way. What did others think of this comparison, and the statement on consumer debt? Did that make anyone else angry?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I didn't so much make me angry--- maybe because I work retail and that would kill my income, but it did make me really uncomfortable to see where he was going with it--I know Ken (or Dr.M) specified that we had not reached the fourth stage in this model, but I really think we are on the threshold of it. How many people do we know do EVERYTHING on-line?...Even this whole identity fraud epidemic which we are having is a direct result of the "viral" stage. Anyway, I thought your post on the post (giggle) was really insightful.
have a nice day yo.
I'm glad you also focused around the point that none of these ideas by theorists are about anything new being "discovered" they're all just interpretations of how to make sense of the same systems. When I first read Ken's post I also got an idea similar to "he thinks this would be foolish or near impossible, that instead we should focus on rescuing illusion and keeping illusion alive" but because there was never a "real" to illustrate, saving the illusion instead isn't so bad.
I also got a weird thought about global warming while reading over and commenting on people's blogs, the way that everyone acknowledges that there are these huge holes in the theories and that so many of our systems are built on everybody being cool with collectively lying. Kind of unsettling, but just a thought. Have fun in class!
The debt example blows my mind. I can't even wrap my head around the numbers, but it seems odd that a country with that big of a deficit can function. I would agree that the system is based on consumption rather than production. It seems like the only way we could possibly exist with the debt.
Post a Comment