Date: Tue, 17 Dec 1996 20:23:26 -0800 From: Bill Bogard (remote) <bogard-AT-WPOFFICE.WHITMAN.EDU> Subject: Re: baudrillard and death -Reply mark o., i guess i can't eleborate too much more on what baudrillard says about death in the passage from _symbolic exchange and death_. for me, it is a critique of 'naturalizing' and 'biologizing' death, something which for baudrillard lies outside signification (representation, language, even 'symbolic exchange,' which at this period of his writing baudrillard opposed to 'sign exchange'). it is a force of absolute disorder/chaos, that is not comprehended by assimiliating it to biological functions or subsuming it under a principle of "reality." that doesn't make death exactly an "illusion" either, though, as someone else suggested. The reality-illusion duality is a product of our civilization--in fact, it is the duality upon which the modern technical forces of simulation are based (let's make the illusion as good as the real! - virtual reality). as for de-socializing death, even marx knew how death could be commodified, marketed and stripped of its social, even human, context. finally, by "repetition in advance," i only mean simulation itself. a simulation repeats the event before it actually happens (like the soldiers that trained on virtual reality devices before they were sent to the gulf war). bb
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