Ken Rufo Response

Well, its safe to say I have my work cut out for me this week. I don't THINK I'm lost, and thats a good sign, right?

I think I was in the same horrible cloud of confusion that Ryan described in his most recent post, but our recent guest Ken Rufo brushed away that which blinded me with his mighty hand of wisdom and truth. So lets see if i can reproduce his strongest points of Baudrillard's thinking.

First and foremost, there is "sign value", or the idea that what an object represents or signifies is often more important than how much it costs or the quality of its construction. Rufo uses Tommy Hilfiger as an example of a designer that utilizes sign value, in that he takes cheap clothing made in a sweatshop and slaps his name onto it to give it a higher value. For this reason, there is a focus on consumption over production.

As Baudrillard's ideas progressed, he started to believe that the Marxist concept of a commodity was not a preexisting discovery, but rather an invention by the theorist. This then creates a theoretical commodity. So, as Rufo puts it, in the same way that one would buy stuff with their money, Marxism can explain stuff with theories and concepts. Voila! Connections!

We find connections to commodity in Saussure's semiotics. The signified and signifier of a commodity is replaced with the use-value and exchange value. Marx considers money to be the pure commodity form because it can be exchanged for anything.

Everything I have written in this post up until this point has been a reminder to myself, above anything. A point of reference when I dive back into this material. I still feel like I have a bit to wrap my mind around, but for now lets get into the good stuff - simulation.

So the three basic orders of simulation as proposed by Baudrillard's book Symbolic Exchange and Death, are as follows
1. Simulation stands in for reality - so if the star player is reality and you are simulation, coach will put you in in the event that the star player is not able to play in the field of language (since language constitutes a reality and all that jazz)
2. Simulation hides the absence of reality
3. Simulation produces its own reality

Later on Baudrillard adds a fourth stage to the mix, the fractal/viral stage. This is the point where simulation is everywhere with no need for models. Ken Rufo uses an awesome example of credit and virtual banking being the fractal stage of our use of money. We hardly see money anymore, because its not physically there. We borrow and spend and save up cash that may as well not even exist. Upon first reading about this stage of simulation, I had difficulty in applying it to anything "real" (for lack of a better word). Thinking of money as simulation, though, has me seriously considering the validity of this theory. This also brings us back to Baudrillard's idea that it is consumption that makes capitalism work, not production. This holds a lot of weight for me, that we are so completely reliant on something such as money is not a new idea, but realizing how little of it we see is almost scary. It may as well not be real, and yet we cannot separate ourselves from it.

So yeah, I have a lot to think about for awhile. This is interesting stuff, but still terribly complicated in many ways. Ken Rufo's post did help greatly though, so this is appreciated.

Oh, and by the way Ken, Skylarking is one of my favorite albums ever. I can't hold anything against a guy who appreciates XTC (the BAND, get your minds out of the gutter).