From: Mark   Nunes <mnunes-AT-dekalb.dc.peachnet.edu>
Subject: Re: symbolic exchange and other things
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 14:08:18 -0400 (EDT)


> 3. Is Baudrillard only offering a description of our world or does he 
> offer ways in which we can, through theory or practice, work with radical 
> thought? If he does, I assume the concepts of symbolic exchange and fatal 
> theory are central to this.

I'm skipping the first two and only opening up the 3rd to see if we can 
actually get any discussion going.

>From my reading, Baudrillard's strategy involves pushing systems in the 
direction of their own fatal headings, rather than trying to resist them. 
Push modernity to its hypertelic moment and watch it implode. But there 
seems to be another strategy at work in Baudrillard's writing, one that 
becomes more apparent in his later texts. That is the strategy of the 
challenge: to challenge concepts and frameworks to mean something. So we 
can read B. as challenging the (often unchallenged) notion of "the real" 
to see if it can be made to mean anything. The same with "the good": 
rather than a banal acceptance of the goodness of everything everywhere 
(at which point, B. says, 'the good' no longer exists), use "evil" as a 
stake--a challenge to the concept of "the good."

Well, that might not be to clear, but hopefully it will generate 
discussion. Oh, Ryan....are you out there?


--Mark