Date: Tue, 5 Aug 1997 23:10:21 +0300 (EET DST)
From: j laari <jlaari-AT-cc.jyu.fi>
Subject: M-TH: semiotics & al / was: use


Russell wrote:

" I don't know how ungenuine it is to state openly that I'm playing
devil's advocate, and that far from hiding under their skirts, what
I'm attempting to do is to introduce some of their critiques to this
discussion. I don't think its good enough to simply dismiss 'em and I
think that my tactics have generated some interesting discussion. " 

In my opinion that has been a good strategy. Such issues has to be
discussed, partly because 'others' are doing it: these have been hot
(cool?) issues recently.

When it comes to semiotics - hmm.. not sure what to think about it. It
has its uses for sure. The problem seems to be that recently it has
been used in areas where it doesn't provide insights some people have
hoped for.


"... the big problem with semiotics is that it 'brackets out the
referent' (Callinicos), ie the real is forever beyond our grasp, and
all meaning becomes ultimately self-referential. " 

Not necessarily, I believe. Peirce's pragmatism doesn't seem to
bracket referent out? Not sure about that. And to the questions
concerning marxisms and linguistics/semiotics: what about Valentin
Volosinov? It's one strategy to consider language "as system" (de
Saussure) and other as "practice". Systemic viewpoint has surely
achieved something - I can't judge - but it's not the only way to look
at the relations between language, communication, action, reality etc.

I'd find it dubious to deny the study of, say, inner workings of
language(s). Problems emerge when taking linguistic and semiotic
theories and applying them as such in social analysis (in broad
sense), without due attention to practices, structures, institutions
etc. It doesn't help to understand the causes of wars by claiming
that, for example, "Fatherland" is just a semiotically produced
ideological illusion without real referent and that people are made
subjects to State as Fatherland by discourse or narration. (Questions:
Why such identifications in first instance? How the subjection to
State really happens? etc.) That's mostly nonsense semiotics. I dimly
remember Baudrillard's book on Symbolic change (the last one I've
read) where he considered symbolic practices in good old
anthropological way. It was hard to label as nonsense semiotics.

Also, among several others on this list, I'm not convinced that
Baudrillard isn't constructing a strawman by claiming Marx and
marxisms had understood "use as real and natural" and "exchange as
unnatural". That's in contradiction to Marx's insistence on
historicity. Well, there surely have been marxists who have believed
so. (I think in his early seventies books Baudrillard was exactly
correcting marxism with his semiotic developments but the problem was
whether his interpretation of Marx was then relevant.) But even in
marxism-leninism there was more or less clear understanding of
workings of language and the nature of ideal/-ity. However, I lost my
interest in Baudrillard years ago and can't really judge him.


" Wots a Sackgasse? "

It's a "blind alley", "deadlock", "impasse" according to my dictionary
(had to check; I would've called it dead-end, though..).


> How can he deny objectivity and claim at the same
> time something about 'simulacrum' (for example)?

" What he is saying *perhaps* is that value operates with exchange as
the simulacrum for use. Now with the simulacrum, this is a copy to
which there is no original. Marx he persumably would claim, would have
use as the original, to which exchange is so many copies. "

My point was that he denied objectivity in the passage you used in
previous post. Despite of that he talks about simulacrum as objective
social fact. That's self-contradictory. See, that's where such
one-sided thinking leads. Like saying, "in my opinion there's no
subjectivity."


" More to the point and less speculatively, Baudrillard, along with
most other neo Kantians, would not deny the Real, but claim that there
is no unmediated access to it. By entertaining the idea of natural
use, we are claiming such unmediated access. "

Unmediated? You must've meant: no access, otherwise 'thing-for-itself'
as real [or am I confusing thing-in-itself with thing-for-itself?
Hugh?] would become meaningless (from kantian viewpoint), that is
'thing-for-us'? "Meaningless" because Kant strictly differentiates
'noumenal' and 'phenomenal' and keeps the gap open. I leave for Hugh
the details of Hegel's critique of Kant (how thing-for-itself becomes
thing-for-us and therefore the real ends being unaccessible and,
roughly, everything becomes thought). Or is Baudrillard really saying
that there is an access, though mediated only, to real?

Secondly, isn't he denying real, if he is saying there's no original
to simulacrum? (I come back to this later.)

It seems that here we have touched 'real' difference between
post-theories (originating, broadly speaking, in one sense with
Schelling) and hegelian and at least some strands of marxist thinking: 
the former insist that we can't collapse real into
thinking/language/symbolic/conscious [ideal, in general], that there's
always a Difference at work. The latter think that (roughly) it
doesn't make sense to suppose something wholly unaccessible real. 
After all, here we are discussing about it... Sounds like present day
linguistic idealism - 'everything's in language.' Marx somehow tried
to take another way by the concept of praxis and thereby can be seen
at least partly as representative of the former group (as real
materialists) without degenerating to 'vulgar materialism' of Brain
Waves or of (Libidinal) Desire only. 

I tried to say in my previous post - concerning sign & such stuff -
that sure it's the case that there's no apparent 'object' to a sign,
no referent to it, but that doesn't justify the conclusion that
there's no referentiality or objectivity at all: it's the language in
toto that refers to reality - there has to be reality in order there
to be language. In a same way it can be said (because after
"linguistic turn" the issues have been re-interpreted as concerning
language only) that the 'object' of thinking and consciousness in
general is reality, that the 'original' of simulacrum is reality.

Now, my question concerning Baudrillard: what he really is saying
about the question of relation between thinking/ideal and
real/reality? Does he insist that there's no real at all (it has
somehow disappeared: "implosion" of the real?) or does he grant it
some status?

Yours, Jukka L




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