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1 -Their hope for the debate space represents a relationship of cruel optimism to the ballot—a hopeful attachment to the logic of a problematic system of economic exchange that stultifies the potential for politics through—the ballot, the source of subjectification and violence, is invested with optimism rather than productive distance.
2 -Berlant 2006 (Lauren, Professor of Literature at the University of Chicago, “Cruel Optimism” in differences 17.3)
3 -When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talk- ing about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us. This cluster of promises could be embed- ded in a person, a thing, an institution, a text, a norm, a bunch of cells, smells, a good idea—whatever. To phrase “the object of desire” as a cluster of promises is to allow us to encounter what is incoherent or enigmatic in our attachments, not as confirmation of our irrationality, but as an explanation for our sense of our endurance in the object, insofar as prox- imity to the object means proximity to the cluster of things that the object promises, some of which may be clear to us while others not so much. In other words, all attachments are optimistic. That does not mean that they all feel optimistic: one might dread, for example, returning to a scene of hunger or longing or the slapstick reiteration of a lover or parent’s typi- cal misrecognition. But the surrender to the return to the scene where the object hovers in its potentialities is the operation of optimism as an affective form (see Ghent). “Cruel optimism” names a relation of attachment to compro- mised conditions of possibility. What is cruel about these attachments, and not merely inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object or scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being, because whatever the content of the attachment, the continuity of the form of it provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world. This phrase points to a condition different than that of melancholia, which is enacted in the subject’s desire to temporize an experience of the loss of an object/scene with which she has identified her ego continuity. Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a problematic object in advance of its loss.¶ One might point out that all objects/scenes of desire are prob- lematic, in that investments in them and projections onto them are less about them than about the cluster of desires and affects we manage to keep magnetized to them. I have indeed wondered whether all optimism is cruel, because the experience of loss of the conditions of its reproduction can be so breathtakingly bad. But some scenes of optimism are crueler than others: where cruel optimism operates, the very vitalizing or ani- mating potency of an object/scene of desire contributes to the attrition of the very thriving that is supposed to be made possible in the work of attachment in the first place. This might point to something as banal as a scouring love, but it also opens out to obsessive appetites, patriotism, a career, all kinds of things. One makes affective bargains about the costliness of one’s attachments, usually unconscious ones, most of which keep one in proximity to the scene of desire/attrition.¶ To understand cruel optimism as an aesthetic of attachment requires embarking on an analysis of the modes of rhetorical indirection that manage the strange activity of projection into an enabling object that is also disabling. I learned how to do this from reading Barbara Johnson’s work on apostrophe and free indirect discourse. In her poetics of indi- rection, each of these rhetorical modes is shaped by the ways a writing subjectivity conjures other ones so that, in a performance of phantasmatic intersubjectivity, the writer gains superhuman observational authority, enabling a performance of being made possible by the proximity of the object. Because the dynamics of this scene are something like what I am describing in the optimism of attachment, I will describe the shape of my transference with her thought.
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5 -Treating difference as a thing to be liberated only works by first establishing a criteria for what counts as difference—this criteria is established internal to the existing system of signification—it is an abstraction defined only per its economic utility.
6 -Grace 2000 (Victoria, Professor of Sociology at Canterbury University, Baudrillard’s Challenge p. 12-14)
7 -Following on from his earliest work on objects and social dynamics of consumption (SO and CS), Baudrillard develops this critique of the ideology of needs in his book For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. He claims that to ‘speak in terms of need is magical thinking’ (PES: 70) precisely because of its status as a kind of origin myth. Here he argues that the positing of subject and object as autonomous and separate entities creates the necessity to devise a myth to establish their relation. This, he says, is accomplished in the concept of need and its allied concepts of mana, instinct, motivation, choice, preference, utility. The syntax of subject needs object is a tautological means of resolving the relationship between the subject and the object, whereby the one is defined in terms of the other: ‘positing the autonomy of the subject and its specular reflection in the autonomy of the object’ (PES: 71). The logic of equivalence (axiomatic to economics) is an abstraction, a code, a rule. For objects to be abstractly and generally exchangeable, they must be thought and rationalised in terms of utility (PES: 131). The code equates the object to its useful end; its function becomes its ontological finality. According to Baudrillard’s analysis, this is where the economic is born (PES: 132). In the same movement, the social relation of use value requires the existence of the abstract individual who becomes not only the person with needs, but also the one with desires, with motivations, with a ‘self’ (and an unconscious) in the privacy of ‘his’ or ‘her’ psychological finitude. 6 I have placed the gendered pronoun in inverted commas here to signal what, I want to argue, is the provisional nature of the gendering of this individual. In the same way as the ‘subject’ is an abstraction necessitated by this dichotomous splitting of ‘subject’ and ‘object’, the notion that gender constitutes an identity of the individual is equally an abstraction. The abstract (gendered) individual with a ‘self’ has to have a relation to ‘him’ or ‘her’ self, a relation which Baudrillard argues is itself structured by the utilitarian imperative: In the process of satisfaction, he sic valorises and makes fruitful his own potentialities for pleasure; he ‘realises’ and manages, to the best of his ability, his own ‘faculty’ of pleasure, treated literally like a productive force. Isn’t this what all of humanist ethics is based on – the ‘proper use’ of oneself?. (PES: 136) In his critique of the naturalised assumption of utility and human needs, and its role in providing an anchoring point for the system of economic exchange value, Baudrillard also analyses the relationship between the two forms of value as two terms of a binary opposition. He points out, as many have before and since, that the structural logic of binary oppositions always privileges one term, which becomes the dominant term. In this context, the logic of equivalence, articulated within a dichotomous structure of ‘same as’ or ‘different from’, is necessary for the construction of ‘identity’: identity is the dominant term (‘same as’). Here we see the powerful significance of the parallel structure of identity/difference; same as/different from; equivalent to/not equivalent to; positive/negative; present not present. This rationalisation which permits the identity of objects to be rendered in their functionality also permits the object to enter the field of political economy as a positive (+) value (PES: 134). Baudrillard characterises the parallel structural form of economic value and signification in the terms of two equivalent dichotomies: EV/UV = Sr/Sd. The ideological form of economic exchange value (EV) is to assume that EV obtains its value from use value (UV), whereas in fact, Baudrillard has argued, UV is an artefact of the social institution of a codified system of EV. 7 In the same way, rather than assuming that the meaning of the Sr obtains in the Sd, Baudrillard argues that the Sd is an artefact of the social institution of a codified system of representation. UV and Sds are only effects of EV and Sr respectively, and neither UV nor the Sd is an autonomous reality that either EV or the Sr ‘would express or translate in their code’ (PES: 137). Here Baudrillard argues that UV and the Sd are only simulation models, produced by the play of EV and Srs, providing the latter with the ‘guarantee of the real, the lived, the concrete’ (PES: 137). As political economy needed UV to institute the order of EV (in the same movement establishing equivalence as an abstract equation of all values), so the Sd was needed to institute an order of meanings making possible the naturalisation of the relationship Sr– Sd. This naturalisation could then produce the appearance that concepts (Sds) exist and precede the Srs that name them. 8 In Baudrillard’s words: The system of use value involves the resorption without trace of the entire ideological and historical labour process that leads the subject in the first place to think of himself sic as an individual, defined by his needs and satisfaction, and thus ideally to integrate himself into the structure of the commodity. (PES: 138) The inalienable point of origin instantiated by the myth of utility is not only parallel to, but inextricably coexistent with, the assumption of the unsurpassable ‘nature’ of meaning. As I mentioned above, whether the Sd conjured by a Sr is assumed to be fixed in Saussure’s terms, in the semantic conventions of a particular language, or whether the Sd is conceptualised as plural in its possibilities, inevitably deferred in poststructuralist, Derridian terms, the dichotomous structure of Sr/Sd remains, the bar that separates them is re-marked, and the assumption of a codified system of meaning continues to underwrite the mode of representation. I hope that the significance of this critique becomes clearer as we consider Baudrillard’s notion of symbolic exchange and seduction.
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9 -This turns the case and takes out solvency—your frame produces the revolutionary hope that debate and society might change but ultimately reinstitutes the same in a way that solidifies and naturalizes the brutal logic of the economy centered on the exchange value.
10 -Berlant 2006 (Lauren, Professor of Literature at the University of Chicago, “Cruel Optimism” in differences 17.3)
11 -It is striking that these moments of optimism, which mark a possibility that the habits of a history might not be reproduced, release an overwhelmingly negative force: one predicts such effects in traumatic scenes, but it is not usual to think about an optimistic event as having the same potential consequences. The conventional fantasy that a revolu- tionary lifting of being might happen in proximity to a new object/scene would predict otherwise than that a person or a group might prefer, after all, to surf from episode to episode while leaning toward a cluster of vaguely phrased prospects. And yet: at a certain degree of abstraction both from trauma and optimism, the experience of self-dissolution, radi- cally reshaped consciousness, new sensoria, and narrative rupture can look similar; the emotional flooding in proximity to a new object can also produce a similar grasping toward stabilizing form, a reanchoring in the symptom’s predictability.¶ I have suggested that the particular ways in which identity and desire are articulated and lived sensually within capitalist culture produce such counterintuitive overlaps. But it would be reductive to read the preceding as a claim that anyone’s subjective transaction with the optimistic structure of value in capital produces the knotty entailments of cruel optimism as such. This essay focuses on artworks that explicitly remediate singularities into cases of nonuniversal but general abstraction, providing narrative scenarios of how people learn to identify, manage, and maintain the hazy luminosity of their attachment to being x and having x, given that their attachments were promises and not possessions after all. Geoff Ryman’s historical novel Was provides a different kind of limit case of cruel optimism. Linking agrarian labor, the culture industries, and therapy culture through four encounters with The Wizard of Oz, its pursuit of the affective continuity of trauma and optimism in self-unfold- ing excitement is neither comic, tragic, nor melodramatic, but metaformal: it absorbs all of these into a literary mode that validates fantasy (from absorption in pretty things to crazy delusion) as a life-affirming defense against the attritions of ordinary history.¶ Was constructs a post-traumatic drama that is held together by the governing consciousness of Bill Davison, a mental health worker, a white heterosexual Midwesterner whose only intimate personal brush with trauma has been ambivalence toward his fiancée but whose profes- sional capacity to enter into the impasse with his patients, and to let their impasses into him, makes him the novel’s optimistic remainder, a rich witness. The first traumatic story told is about the real Dorothy Gale, spelled Gael, partly, I imagine, to link up the girl who’s transported to Oz on a strong breeze to someone in prison, and also to link her to the Gaelic part of Scotland, home of the historical novel, the genre whose affective and political conventions shape explicitly Ryman’s quasi-documentary inclusion of experiences and memories whose traces are in archives, land- scapes, and bodies scattered throughout Kansas, Canada, and the United States. Like Cooter, this Dorothy Gael uses whatever fantasy she can scrap together to survive her scene of hopeless historical embeddedness. But her process is not to drift vaguely, but intensely, by way of multigeneric inven- tion: dreams, fantasies, private plays, psychotic projection, aggressive quiet, lying, being a loud bully and a frank truth teller. Dorothy’s creativity makes a wall of post-traumatic noise, as she has been abandoned by her parents, raped and shamed by her Uncle Henry Gulch, and shunned by other children for being big, fat, and ineloquent.¶ Part 2 of Was tells the story of Judy Garland as the child Frances Gumm. On the Wizard of Oz set she plays Dorothy Gale as desexualized sweetheart, her breasts tightly bound so that she can remain a child and therefore have her childhood stolen from her. It is not stolen through rape, but by parents bound up in their own fantasies of living through children in terms of money and fame (Gumm’s mother) or sex (Gumm’s father, whose object choice was young boys). The third story in Was is about a fictional gay man, a minor Hollywood actor named Jonathan, whose fame comes from being the monster in serial killer movies titled The Child Minder and who, as the book begins, is offered a part in a touring Wizard of Oz company while he is entering aids dementia. All of these stories are about the cruelty of optimism for people without control over the material condi- tions of their lives and whose relation to fantasy is all that protects them from being destroyed by other people and the nation. I cannot do justice here to the singularities of what optimism makes possible and impossible in this entire book but want to focus on a scene that makes the whole book possible. In this scene, Dorothy Gael encounters a substitute teacher, Frank Baum, in her rural Kansas elementary school.¶ “The children,” writes Ryman, “knew the Substitute was not a real teacher because he was so soft” (168). “Substitute” derives from the word “succeed,” and the sense of possibility around the changeover is deeply embedded in the word. A substitute brings optimism if he hasn’t yet been defeated—by life or by the students. He enters their lives as a new site for attachment, a dedramatized possibility. He is by definition a placeholder, a space of abeyance, an aleatory event. His coming is not personal—he is not there for anyone in particular. The amount of affect released around him says something about the intensity of the children’s available drive to be less dead, numb, neutralized, or crazy with habit; but it says nothing about what it would feel like to be in transit between the stale life and all its others, or whether that feeling would lead to something good.¶ Of course, often students are cruel to substitutes, out of excite- ment at the unpredictable and out of not having fear or transference to make them docile or even desiring of a recognition that has no time to be built. But this substitute is special to Dorothy: he is an actor, like her parents; he teaches them Turkish, and tells them about alternative histo- ries lived right now and in the past (171). Dorothy fantasizes about Frank Baum not in a narrative way, but with a mixture of sheer pleasure and defense: “Frank, Frank, as her uncle put his hands on her” (169); then she berates herself for her “own unworthiness” (169) because she knows “how beautiful you are and I know how ugly I am and how you could never have anything to do with me” (174). She says his name, Frank, over and over: it “seemed to sum up everything that was missing from her life” (169). Yet, face to face she cannot bear the feeling of relief from her life that the substitute’s being near provides for her. She alternately bristles and melts at his deference, his undemanding kindness. She mocks him and disrupts class to drown out her tenderness, but obeys him when he asks her to leave the room to just write something, anything.¶ What she comes back with is a lie, a wish. Her dog, Toto, had been murdered by her aunt and uncle, who hated him and who had no food to spare for him. But the story she hands in to the substitute is a substitute: it is about how happy she and Toto are. It includes sentences about how they play together and how exuberant he is, running around yelping “like he is saying hello to everything” (174). Imaginary Toto sits on her lap, licks her hand, has a cold nose, sleeps on her lap, and eats food that Auntie Em gives her to give him. The essay suggests a successful life, a life where love circulates and extends its sympathies, rather than the life she actually lives, where “it was as if they had all stood back-to-back, shouting ‘love’ at the tops of their lungs, but in the wrong direction, away from each other” (221). It carries traces of all of the good experience Dorothy has ever had. The essay closes this way: “I did not call him Toto. That is the name my mother gave him when she was alive. It is the same as mine” (175).¶ Toto, Dodo, Dorothy: the teacher sees that the child has opened up something in herself, let down a defense, and he is moved by the brav- ery of her admission of identification and attachment. But he makes the mistake of being mimetic in response, acting soft toward her in a way he might imagine that she seeks to be: “I’m very glad,” he murmured, “that you have something to love as much as that little animal.” Dorothy goes ballistic at this response and insults Baum, but goes on to blurt out all of the truths of her life, in public, in front of the other students. She talks nonstop about being raped and hungry all the time, about the murder of her dog, and about her ineloquence: “I can’t say anything,” she closes (176). That phrase means she can’t do anything to change anything. From here she regresses to yelping and tries to dig a hole in the ground, to become the size she feels, and also to become, in a sense, an embodiment of the last thing she loved. After that, Dorothy goes crazy, lives in a fantasy world of her own, wandering homeless and free, especially, of the capacity to reflect on loss in the modalities of realism, tragedy, or melodrama. To protect her last iota of optimism, she goes crazy.¶ In Was, Baum goes on to write The Wizard of Oz as a gift of alternativity to the person who can’t say or do anything to change her life materially and who has taken in so much that one moment of relief from herself produces a permanent crack in the available genres of her survival. In “What Is a Minor Literature?” Deleuze and Guattari exhort people to become minor in exactly that way, to deterritorialize from the normal by digging a hole in sense, like a dog or a mole. Creating an impasse, a space of internal displacement, in this view, shatters the normal hierar- chies, clarities, tyrannies, and confusions of compliance with autonomous individuality. This strategy looks promising in the Ashbery poem. But in “Exchange Value,” a moment of relief produces a psychotic defense against the risk of loss in optimism. For Dorothy Gael, in Was, the optimism of attachment to another living being is itself the cruelest slap of all.¶ From this cluster we can understand a bit more of the magnetic attraction to cruel optimism, with its suppression of the risks of attach- ment. A change of heart, a sensorial shift, intersubjectivity, or transference with a promising object cannot generate on its own the better good life: nor can the collaboration of a couple, brothers, or pedagogy. The vague futurities of normative optimism produce small self-interruptions as the utopias of structural inequality. The texts we have looked at here stage moments when it could become otherwise, but shifts in affective atmo- sphere are not equal to changing the world. They are, here, only pieces of an argument about the centrality of optimistic fantasy to reproducing and surviving in zones of compromised ordinariness. And that is one way to take the measure of the impasse of living in the overwhelmingly present moment.
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13 -The reduction of all existence to the economy of signification is the elimination of the value to life and extermination
14 -Michael Dillon, professor of politics and international relations at the University of Lancaster, April 1999, Political Theory, Vol. 27, No. 2, “Another Justice,” p. 164-5
15 -Quite the reverse. The subject was never a firm foundation for justice, much less a hospitable vehicle for the reception of the call of another Justice. It was never in possession of that self-possession which was supposed to secure the certainty of itself, of a self-possession that would enable it ultimately to adjudicate everything. The very indexicality required of sovereign subjectivity gave rise rather to a commensurability much more amenable to the expendability required of the political and material economies of mass societies than it did to the singular, invaluable, and uncanny uniqueness of the self. The value of the subject became the standard unit of currency for the political arithmetic of States and the political economies of capitalism. They trade in it still to devastating global effect. The technologisation of the political has become manifest and global. Economies of evaluation necessarily require calculability. Thus no valuation without mensuration and no mensuration without indexation. Once rendered calculable, however, units of account are necessarily submissible not only to valuation but also, of course, to devaluation. Devaluation, logically, can extend to the point of counting as nothing. Hence, no mensuration without demensuration either. There is nothing abstract about this: the declension of economies of value leads to the zero point of holocaust. However liberating and emancipating systems of value-rights-may claim to be, for example, they run the risk of counting out the invaluable. Counted out, the invaluable may then lose its purchase on life. Herewith, then, the necessity of championing the invaluable itself. For we must never forget that, “we are dealing always with whatever exceeds measure.” But how does that necessity present itself? Another Justice answers: as the surplus of the duty to answer to the claim of Justice over rights. That duty, as with the advent of another Justice, is integral to the lack constitutive of the human way of being
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17 -Our alternative is to reread the circumstance of the debate as an expression of the logic of exchange value—this lens produces our perspective of symbolic exchange which solves their arguments better by providing the only locus of meaningful political critique—opening this lens allows us to read the ballot against itself.
18 -
19 -Conceiving of symbolic exchange rather than exchange on the basis of use value solves by blurring the subject/object relation through mechanisms that create indistinction—asking to commodify political projects shuts down symbolic exchange because those projects can only exist as commodities
20 -Grace 2000 (Victoria, Professor of Sociology at Canterbury University, Baudrillard’s Challenge p. 18-19)
21 -Symbolic exchange is the radical other from the economic. According to Baudrillard, the economic, in its classical and neo-classical form, 11 is born when what the object ‘is’ is assumed to reside within it, it has an essence; when the object attains its value in accordance with an abstract code that enables its relation to other objects to be ascertained through a logic of equivalence which in turn obtains its rationale from the ideology of utility and use value; and when the individual emerges as a ‘subject’ whose relation to the world of objects is articulated primarily through the ideology of need (and, with psychoanalysis, desire). From this critical viewpoint, the notion of the ‘individual’ as it emerged from the Enlightenment period with needs, ‘liberated’ from the ties and constraints of a previous era, is an abstraction. And the discourse of liberation can be understood as a process of interiorising subjectivity resulting from the dichotomous separation of subject and object. This ‘subject’ of industrialising modernity has an essence, ‘an abstract essence over which the identity of the subject comes to fix itself’ (MOP: 95). By contrast, symbolic exchange is a form of exchange, a form of construction of objects and their meaning, that is antithetical to the economic. The poles of the exchange are not automatised; there is neither essence nor absolute separation of subject from object. Both are continually transformed through the exchange. There is no identity. 12 The ontology of objects is inexorably ambivalent. Goods are not produced, nor do they exist as commodities or products. Most importantly, goods are destined to circulate in a social process of exchange that augments the social in terms of the creation and destruction, the giving and returning or passing on, of the ‘gift’. This process negates the possibility of power through accumulation. The individual is not an ‘individual’ with an interior psychology, a subjectivity, an identity, with needs and desires. Within this construct of the symbolic exchange, language is symbolic, similarly ambivalent, and must be exchanged. Words evoke, point, seduce, act rather than connote and denote. And they circulate. Stockpiles of words that do not circulate and are not exchanged are, as Baudrillard writes, more deadly than the accumulation of waste from industrialisation (SEandD: 203). The logic of the symbolic and symbolic exchange is one of ambivalence and transformation through circulation; the positive and the negative, presence and absence (if one can talk in these terms), are always activated.
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23 -Voting negative to open the ballot up to a lens of symbolic exchange divests the ballot of the ability to represent truth and meaning—we instead play with the signifier of the ballot by READING IT AGAINST ITSELF which allows us deoperationalize it’s power.
24 -Robinson 12 Robinson, Andrew. "An A to Z of Theory | Jean Baudrillard: Symbolic Exchange." Ceasefire Magazine RSS. N.p., 17 Feb. 2012. Web. 19 Feb. 2014.
25 -Symbolic exchange – the aspect of life which is missing today according to Baudrillard – is central to his entire theory. If simulation is the exchange of signs with signs, symbolic exchange is the exchange of signs with the real. Baudrillard treats the symbolic as an “outside” to representation, the code, value, production, the law, master-signification, and the unconscious – hence as radically other to most of the familiar institutions and roles of capitalist/statist systems. Baudrillard’s idea of symbolic exchange is loosely based on Marcel Mauss’s analysis of gifts in indigenous social life, though he takes it in a different direction from Mauss, using it to analyse what is missing in today’s capitalist societies.¶ There were, according to Baudrillard, societies without the social. They existed without the kind of representational systems which create the appearance of social life in modernity. Instead, they were based on networks of symbolic ties.¶ They were outside production because their social forms were instead based on excess, expenditure and the symbolic. Excess exists instead of surplus or accumulation. Nothing is taken from nature without being returned. They were neither societies of scarcity, nor did they limit their “production” to avoid a “surplus”. They were simply outside the logic of production.¶ Symbolic exchange is fundamental to the nature of ‘society’ in such groups. People in indigenous groups are not simply born, biologically. They become part of society through initiation. This is a process marked by exchanges and rituals. Forms of marking, such as tattoos, turn people and the world into material for symbolic exchange. They then enter into an uninterrupted, ongoing process of exchange. According to Baudrillard, initiation is a second birth, into a symbolic order. It breaks the Oedipal nexus of natural birth. The whole body can be used in exchange. Initiation, torture, tattooing, as well as sexuality were used to perform symbolic exchange.¶ The idea of seduction (more on this later) is closely linked to symbolic exchange. Seduction is a type of initiation. Those who ‘seduce’ someone become the second, initiatory parents. Initiation is a pure ‘event without precedent’ which is the beginning of a destiny. Destiny is taken to escape history, causality, determination and genesis, at least on the level of experience. It is something which ‘happens without your having anything to do with it’ – in other words, it is experienced as extra-subjective.¶ Symbolic exchange allows people and objects to enter a realm of destiny, where things aren’t arbitrary. Destiny is distinct from chance, probability and the aleatory – which are central aspects of modernity. The chance happening, such as birth, does not create an event. A true event only occurs via a second birth or death. Only through true events do we attain intensity. Crucially, symbolic exchange establishes a relationship between signs and reality. It allows signs to “mean”.¶ Reality is here conceived as subjective, experiential, and expressive. In one passage in The Consumer Society, Baudrillard identifies the symbolic with a childlike emotional response to a new object or gadget. Such a response is intense, ignorant of fashion, and disregarding of others’ demands for particular meanings. It is the opposite of how consumer society works. The introduction of combinations of elements, rules of the game and so on is seen as eliminating such libidinal investment of objects. Passion is replaced by indifferent fascination or curiosity. He also suggests there was initially an absence of reproducibility in indigenous society, to the point where the existence of two identical books is bewildering.¶ Symbolic exchange also gives us a singularity or uniqueness. Symbolic exchange gives objects an individuality which rips them out of sign-, use- and exchange-value. Each object becomes unique, ambivalent and reciprocal or reversible with other objects. Initiation is based on the possibility for any system or category to overflow into others – to escape its path-dependency and jump tracks. It also removes the separation, and therefore the meaning, of things. This removal of separation causes an intense enjoyment. Indeed, Baudrillard sees this reversibility or ambivalence as the sole source of enjoyment. (Enjoyment should here be seen, as in Lacanian theory, as distinct from ‘pleasure’). Humour is a remnant of this kind of reversible enjoyment.¶ There is also no bar between subject and object in symbolic exchange. The subject does not attempt to master the object, but rather, accepts being analysed by it in turn – a relation of reversibility. Similarly, humans and animals are part of an interchangeable cycle. Genders are reversible (it is modernity which strictly establishes gender binaries). According to Baudrillard, we should respect the inhuman. Cultures dismissed as fatalist actually find their law from the inhuman. Symbolic exchange also destroys the other cherished separations of modernity. Sexuality, for instance, does not exist outside modernity. Sex is simply part of a cycle of exchanges.¶ Initiation is fundamentally a group, rather than a privatised or massified, phenomenon. It is a passage through the cycle of life and death, through a symbolic event in which one is reborn as a social being and hence enters the field of symbolic exchange. It summons away the splitting of life and death, and therefore fatality towards life. In the symbolic order, life is to be exchanged and returned, eventually returned to death. As a group event, it also separates a particular group from the whole of humanity. The specificity of a symbolic society also depends on a boundary against other groups, a “them and us”. This process is also not individualised, as in Oedipal psychology, but occurs through a collective movement of exchanges.¶ Symbolic exchange is based on the pact, challenge or alliance, which are consciously artificial and initiatory. It is based on ritual defiance and obligation, rather than liberty; metamorphosis, rather than the accumulation of energy.¶ Although it grounds an experience of things as meaningful, symbolic exchange is not heavy with meaning and truth. For Baudrillard, the most intense human experiences don’t come from bodies or from the natural. They come from artificial systems. Rituals produce ecstatic connections based on esoteric rules. They have no meaning. They instead introduce people into initiatory cycles or appearance and disappearance. Baudrillard argues that symbolic ritual is esoteric, whereas Christian ideas of love are exoteric. Symbolic exchange occurs as a light, superficial play of signs without meaning. This contrasts with later systems of emotional investment heavy with meaning. Rules are necessary to symbolic exchange, but are something people simply invent, with ‘the intensity and simplicity of child’s play’.
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