Baudrillard and Signs by Genosko Gary;

Author:Genosko, Gary; [GARY GENOSKO]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

HOSTAGE ANTI-VALUE

‘Nous sommes tous des otages’: this phrase is a refrain in Baudrillard’s writings from L’Echange symbolique to La Transparence. Who or what is holding ‘us’ hostage? We are all hostages in the sense that the system holds our death in the balance. My death is out of my hands—it will be minutely administered, officially announced and, in short, coded in a structural economy of death; no matter how I die, my death will be found out.

Throughout ‘Ma mort partout, ma mort qui rêve’ in L’Echange symbolique, Baudrillard elaborates his conception of death in terms of the gift and counter-gift couched in an anti-economic, symbolic obligation to return what one has received (1976: 243– 82). The counter-gift is not life. One is completely trapped in ‘the biological simulation of one’s own body’ if, Baudrillard argues, one neither wants to give nor receive death. In his presentation of the symbolic exchange of death, Baudrillard first animates the system’s gift of death by evoking the spiritual power of the gift. Even the gift of death issued from the statistical indifference of an anonymous system may be socialized in a radical gesture. Baudrillard imports the idea from Mauss that the thing received has a ‘soul’. One would not dare to keep it or refuse to return it, thereby breaking the social bond it establishes and risk bringing its moral and spiritual power against oneself. As a gift, death obliges one to return a counter-gift to the system. The system manifests its superiority by controlling death, in giving a gift that cannot be returned. To accept a gift without returning it in kind or with something even more powerful or valuable is to subordinate oneself to the giver (Mauss, 1973: 269).

Baudrillard is not interested in drawing subtle anthropological distinctions between the Haida and the Maori, between the potlatch and the ‘hau’ of ‘taonga’. Baudrillard’s efforts are guided by the following sentiment expressed by Mauss: ‘In our times, the old principles react against the rigors, abstractions, and inhumanity of our codes’ (1973: 260). The symbolic violates the code and shortcircuits capitalist-exchangist relations. Deleuze and Guattari also turned to Mauss for much the same reason in Anti-Oedipus (1977: 185ff). They praised Mauss for ‘at least leaving open’ the question that debt was not reducible to a structural exchange, that it challenged the idea of exchange and could become the basis for an alternative definition of society. But Deleuze and Guattari do not accept Baudrillard’s idea of a non-structural exchange since exchange remains the conceptual basis of the definition of society rather than their notion of inscription.

How can one possibly eclipse the power of the system? Baudrillard writes:

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