Date: Tue, 03 Mar 1998 10:07:21 -0500 (EST)
From: mnunes-AT-dekalb.dc.peachnet.edu
Subject: Re: A possible "sellout"?


> 
> > 
> > How could the 'real' disappear in the first place? The 'real', being a
> > signified, is an effect of the signifiers, how could it disappear before the
> > change of signproduction?
> > 
> > -erik
> 
> 
> Hyperreality is radical illusion. Everything that takes place is an illusion, not 
> because our representations of the world make it appear as an illusion, but because the 
> world-in-itself - apart from how we perceive it - is an illusion.
> 
> I'm not sure how this came about in the first place (but it is a damn good question). It 
> might have something to do with late capitalism (but B would probably disagree in this). 
> In order to seduce consumers, signs were accelerated to such a degree that they simply 
> lost the gravitational pull towards reality.

More Baudrillard to help clarify "Baudrillard" ;>


	A revolution has put an end to this 'classical' economics of value, a 
revolution of value itself, which carries value beyond its commodity form 
into its radical form.
	This revolution consists in the dislocation of the two aspects of 
the law of value, which were thought to be coherent and eternally bound as 
if by a natural law. *Referential value is annihilated, giving the 
structural play of value the upper hand*. The structural dimension 
becomes autonomous by excluding the referential dimension, and is 
instituted upon the death of reference. The systems of reference for 
production, signification, the affect, substance and history, all this 
equivalence to a 'real' content, loading the sign with the burden of 
'utility', with gravity--its form of representative equivalence--all this 
is over with. Now the other stage of value has the upper hand, a total 
relativity, general commutation, combination and simulation--simulation 
in the sense that, from now on, signs are exchanged against each other 
rather than against the real (it is not that they just happen to be 
exchanged against each other, they do so *on condition* that they are no 
longer exchanged against the real).

					From "The End of Production",
					  _Symbolic Exchange and Death_