https://www.tumblr.com/zendayaimdb/815419543549837312?source=share
at the risk of sounding like one of your students (or even younger than that), what does this mean?????!!!! and why is it something to criticise????? 😟😟😟
no worries, i'm happy to analyze the baudrillard with you. i appreciate these kinds of asks, especially because pregnancy brain fog has made me feel a bit slow!
It is often said that the West's great undertaking is the commercialization of the whole world, the hitching of the fate of everything to the fate of the commodity. baudrillard's primary critique in this quote is his charge that western culture is essentially hollowed-out by capitalism (herein alluded to by his discussion of "commodities"). this is signified by the pedestal on which we place commodities as culture; take, for example, profit-driven and corporatized hollywood as a maker of culture.
That great undertaking will turn out rather to have been the aestheticization of the whole world—its cosmopolitan spectacularization, its transformation into images, its semiological organization. baudrillard wrote extensively on the field of semiotics, or how we make meaning through language and other representations of things (objects, people, places) and ideas. here he is arguing that aesthetics, or the way in which we represent ideas through symbolic imagery and commodities, has become the primary cultural mode in the west. where image means more than ideas and ideas can be easily reduced to mere images (think of "old money dressing" as an aesthetic symbol of wealth). i like that he highlights the role of spectacle especially--i feel that accurately represents our current culture, which makes a spectacle of everything. social media is spectacle ("drama") driven, entertainment relies on spectacle, the US president acts solely to capture attention and create spectacle. we are over-stimulated by this constant circus, which is colorful and empty and exhausting. like eating a loaf of brioche, filling and empty.
What we are witnessing, beyond the materialist rule of the commodity, is a semio-urgy of everything by means of advertising, the media, or images. No matter how marginal, or banal, or even obscene it may be everything is subject to aestheticization, culturalization, museumification. "materialist" refers to the real conditions of the world. here baudrillard argues that material conditions are essentially beholden to the primacy of the commodity. think of how americans struggle to gain social mobility or even pay rent but own so many things. how we spend our disposable income on commodities that help us communicate our identity in our culture which values aesthetics and spectacle above all. baudrillard also cites his framework of semiourgy here, which is shorthand for this idea that our culture relies on commodifying everything and turning it into a spectacle. here he claims that even the most discarded cultural objects have value under these conditions; think, again, of how tiktok turns everyday objects like fidget toys, canvas bags, and water bottles into aesthetic objects which serve to signal to others your own value in our wider culture.
Everything is said, everything is exposed, everything acquires the force, or the manner, of a sign. The system runs less on the surplus-value of the commodity than on the aesthetic surplus-value of the sign. how much is a birkin bag worth, as a material item? perhaps a few thousand dollars, counting for artisan labor. but as a sign, it is a powerful object. so powerful that it acquires a "surplus-value" that makes it the literal representation of an aesthetic.
kylie in front of her wall of birkin bags helps us illustrate what baudrillard means and why he is so critical. this image shows a young woman posing in front of a wall of handbags. but it means so much more than what it shows. the image is a spectacle; the handbags signify her class status, her body, sculpted by plastic surgeons, signifies her desirability and her access. she communicates to the consumer that these commodities--her bags, her bra, her breasts--are her life and her life is an aesthetic ideal that many seek to follow. she has become a spectacle personified. everything she does is notable, which places her as a maker of culture in our hollowed-out society. she matters not because she produces anything, but because she buys things. she has near-unlimited access to buying things. the idea that a perfect life, a perfect body, a perfect happiness, can be achieved through the act of being a consumer is central to capitalism.
