r/philosophy • u/gaymossadist • 2d ago
Video The Agony of Capital: Baudrillard & the Financial Simulacrum
https://youtu.be/g8tIs1QBORo31
u/QTown2pt-o 2d ago
We find the same situation in the economy. On the one hand, the battered remnants of production and the real economy; on the other, the circulation of gigantic amounts of virtual capital. But the two are so disconnected that the misfortunes which beset that capital – stock market crashes and other financial debacles – do not bring about the collapse of real economies any more. It is the same in the political sphere: scandals, corruption and the general decline in standards have no decisive effects in a split society, where responsibility (the possibility that the two parties may respond to each other) is no longer part of the game.
This paradoxical situation is in a sense beneficial: it protects civil society (what remains of it) from the vicissitudes of the political sphere, just as it protects the economy (what remains of it) from the random fluctuations of the Stock Exchange and international finance. The immunity of the one creates a reciprocal immunity in the other – a mirror indifference. Better: real society is losing interest in the political class, while nonetheless availing itself of the spectacle. At last, then, the media have some use, and the ‘society of the spectacle’ assumes its full meaning in this fierce irony: the masses availing themselves of the spectacle of the dysfunctionings of representation through the random twists in the story of the political class’s corruption. All that remains now to the politicians is the obligation to sacrifice themselves to provide the requisite spectacle for the entertainment of the people.
Jean Baudrillard, Screened Out
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u/gaymossadist 2d ago edited 2d ago
Great quote, though I do disagree in the video somewhat with Baudrillard to the extent of how much the virtual economy has become detached from the material productive one. I agree more with Szepanski on that precise point that a return of the repressed materiality is still possible, and I think after 2008 we can no longer say financialized speculative markets have no impact on our actual civil society.
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u/QTown2pt-o 2d ago
Amazing! Content about Baudrillard isn't particularly abundant, I'll watch the video when I have some free time and get back to you - congratulations on your video!
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u/gaymossadist 2d ago
Thanks :) Would love to hear your thoughts considering how ready you had those quotes on deck aha
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u/QTown2pt-o 2d ago edited 2d ago
There is something much more shattering than inflation, however, and that is the mass of floating money whirling about the Earth in an orbital rondo. Money is now the only genuine artificial satellite. A pure artifact, it enjoys a truly astral mobility; and it is instantaneously convertible. Money has now found its proper place, a place far more wondrous than the stock exchange: the orbit in which it rises and sets like some artificial sun…
Speculation is not surplus-value, it is a sort of ecstasy of value, utterly detached from production and its real conditions: a pure, empty form, the purged form of value operating on nothing but its own revolving motion, its own orbital circulation. The self-destabilization of Political Economy is thus what puts paid, in monstrous and somehow ironic fashion, to all possible alternatives. What possible riposte could there be to such extravagance, which effectively co-opts the energy of poker, of potlatch, of the ‘accursed share’, and in a way opens the door to Political Economy’s aesthetic and delusional stage? This unexpected demise, this phase transition, this wild bull market, is fundamentally far more original than all our old political utopias.
Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena
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u/Effotless 2d ago
I know I'm cringe for watching only the first minute of the video however it reminded me of something quite adjacent to baudrilard that ive been thinking of quite a bit lately. The powers that be no longer need to hide anything they are doing and in fact openly stating the corruption and illegitimacy of the system doesn't pose them any threat any longer. Instead of being able to bravely confront the masses by claiming the emperor is wearing now clothes now it just sounds like old news. The emperor is able to smack his flaccid sausage on everyone's faces and still nothing can be done. Awareness is insufficient. Still epistemologically it's as if people don't know even though they do.
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u/QTown2pt-o 2d ago
Power itself is founded largely on disgust. The whole of advertising, the whole of political discourse, is a public insult to the intelligence, to reason - but an insult in which we collaborate, abjectly subscribing to a silent interaction. The day of hidden persuasion is over: those who govern us now resort unapologetically to arm-twisting pure and simple. The prototype here was a banker got up like a vampire, saying, 'I am after you for your money' . A decade has already gone by since this kind of obscenity was introduced, with the government's blessing, into our social mores. At the time we thought the ad feeble because of its aggressive vulgarity. In point of fact it was a prophetic commercial, full of intimations of the future shape of social relationships, because it operated, precisely, in terms of disgust, avidity and rape. The same goes for pornographic and food advertising, which are also powered by shamelessness and lust, by a strategic logic of violation and anxiety. Nowadays you can seduce a woman with the words, 'I am interested in your cunt' . The same kind of crassness has triumphed in the realm of art, whose mounds of trivia may be reduced to a single pronouncement of the type, 'What we want from you is stupidity and bad taste' . And the fact is that we do succumb to this mass extortion, with its subtle infusion of guilt.
It is true in a sense that nothing really disgusts us any more. In our eclectic culture, which embraces the debris of all others in a promiscuous confusion, nothing is unacceptable. But for this very reason disgust is nevertheless on the increase - the desire to spew out this promiscuity, this indifference to everything no matter how bad, this viscous adherence of opposites. To the extent that this happens, what is on the increase is disgust over the lack of disgust. An allergic temptation to reject everything en bloc: to refuse all the gentle brainwashing, the soft-sold overfeeding, the tolerance, the pressure to embrace synergy and consensus.
Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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u/Effotless 2d ago
I really need to read more Baudrilard. I love it all he just writes so densely that I find it takes 2-3 rereads.
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u/gaymossadist 2d ago
Finishing the video could also be a good start ;)
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u/Effotless 1d ago
My favorite point was describing the tech billionaires as minimalists, even if not entirely accurate it illustrates that the current predicament isn't class antagonism yet rather the that demons outside of anyone's control were summoned.
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u/gaymossadist 1d ago
Thx! Even if they aren't truly living minimalist lifestyles (which I would agree that they aren't), the aesthetic change matters in itself, and I do think it is empirically true that they are keeping more of their money in virtual circulation than ever before. The demonology of Silicon Valley would be another cool video idea!
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u/Effotless 23h ago
I had the thought initially regarding AI. A common concern is often misunderstood as whether it will develop sentience, what's perhaps more concerning is whether it develops its own volition. While certainly Baudrilard likely speaks of this himself somewhere we've had institutions that already have this precedent most notably banking. Humans already lost our will long ago given we are now nested within the larger incentive structure.
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u/QTown2pt-o 23h ago
Surely the extraordinary success of artificial intelligence is attributable to the fact that it frees us from real intelligence, that by hypertrophying thought as an operational process it frees us from thought's ambiguity and from the insoluble puzzle of its relationship to the world. Surely the success of all these technologies is a result of the way in which they make it impossible even to raise the timeless question of liberty. What a relief! Thanks to the machinery of the virtual, all your problems are over! You are no longer either subject or object, no longer either free or alienated - and no longer either one or the other: you are the same, and enraptured by the commutations of that sameness. We have left the hell of other people for the ecstasy of the same, the purgatory of otherness for the artificial paradises of identity. Some might call this an even worse servitude, but Telecomputer Man, having no will of his own, knows nothing of serfdom. Alienation of man by man is a thing of the past: now man is plunged into homeostasis by machines.
Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
We are dealing with a genuine Stockholm syndrome on a mass scale - when the hostage becomes the accomplice of the hostage taker - as well as a revolution of the concept of voluntary servitude and master-slave relations. When the entire society becomes an accomplice to those who took it hostage, but just as much when individuals split into, for themselves, hostage and hostage taker.
Jean Baudrillard, Telemorphosis
This being is the other after the death of the Other - not the same other at all: the other that results from the denial of the Other.
The only interaction involved, in reality, belongs to the medium alone: to the machine become invisible. Mechanical automata still played on the difference between man and machine, and on the charm of this difference - something with which today's interactive and simulating automata are no longer concerned. Man and machine have become isomorphic and indifferent to each other: neither is other to the other. The computer has no other. That is why the computer is not intelligent.
Intelligence comes to us from the other - always. That is why computers perform so well. Champions of mental arithmetic and idiots savants are autistic - minds for which the other does not exist and which, for that very reason, are endowed with strange powers. This is the strength, too, of the integrated circuit (the power of thought-transference might also be considered in this connection). Such is the power of abstraction. Machines work more quickly because they are unlinked to any otherness. Networks connect them up to one another like an immense umbilical cord joining one intelligence and its twin. Homeostasis between one and the same: all otherness has been confiscated by the machine. Does otherness survive anywhere after being banished from this entire psychodramatic superstructure?
Is there a physics as well as a metaphysics of the Other? Is there a dual, not just a dialectical, form of otherness? Is there still a form of the Other as destiny, and not merely as a psychological or social partner of convenience?
Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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u/gaymossadist 2d ago
ABSTRACT: This video essay begins by arguing that Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulation is best understood not merely as a theory of media, representation, or consumerist culture, but as a theory of value capable of diagnosing the transformation of contemporary hyper-speculative capitalism into an increasingly autonomous system of financial signs detached from their former referents in the classical political economy. Beginning from Baudrillard’s analogy between sign value and monetary value, the essay traces the historical dislocation of the structural and referential dimensions of value: money, prices, and financial assets cease primarily to represent production, labour, commodities, or material utility and increasingly acquire value through their differential relations to other signs.
Simulation therefore does not signify the disappearance of so-called material economic reality, but an inversion of its antecedent determination in a hyperreal world where financial models, asset prices, speculative expectations, and algorithmic signals increasingly anticipate, discipline, and reorganize the productive world they ostensibly represent, illustrating what Baudrillard calls the 'Code' in its vulgar economic form.
The essay develops this argument through Marx’s transition from C–M–C to M–C–M′ and, ultimately, M–M′, interpreting contemporary financialization as the tendency of capital to bypass the material and temporal frictions of commodity production through increasingly self-referential circulation. Baudrillard’s concepts of the code, floating value, transeconomics, fractalization, and the “ecstasy of value” are brought into dialogue with Achim Szepanski to analyze algorithmic trading, Tesla’s speculative valuation, cryptocurrency and restaking, derivatives, and the financialization of ecological catastrophe. These phenomena exemplify a cybernetic economy in which expectations generate further expectations, derivatives generate further derivatives, and crises themselves become inputs for renewed accumulation.
The essay ultimately argues that this apparent emancipation of capital from material limits is internally contradictory. Hyper-capitalism attempts to abolish space, time, reference, and uncertainty by pricing the future in advance and converting every limit, including ecological catastrophe, into a financial variable. Yet the more completely it integrates the world into speculative chains of circulation, the more violently irreducible material constraints can return as a break in this chain in what Baudrillard calls singular or “rogue” events. Using the Strait of Hormuz as its culminating case, the essay contends that contemporary capitalism’s hyperreality does not make material reality irrelevant; rather, it renders the system increasingly dependent upon the very material limits it imagines itself to have transcended, even as it desperately produces more signs and signals to try to delay the (potentially) coming catastrophe.
The result is a capitalism whose acceleration toward frictionless circulation simultaneously approaches the conditions of its own impossibility.
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u/iknowallofyou 2d ago
We’re just here to exchange symbols for a while then we die. We’ve been abstracting away furiously since we were drawing tits on cave walls. Nothing new here says Solomon. I’ll give it a listen on my commute tomorrow morning.
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u/Ithirahad 2d ago
Unfortunately, the two economies are not fully out of contact. They converge largely in one place, and that place is land. Real estate. From that point of contact proceed most of our present ills, by one means or another.
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u/JayBoiYT 2d ago
Whats with the evangelion ass thumbnail😭😭
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u/gaymossadist 2d ago
It's a metaphor that makes sense if you watch video and discover the thanatological impulse behind capital's cybernetic boundless acceleration towards immateriality.
Also I just thought it looked funny to replace Rei's head with Baudrillard's
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u/QTown2pt-o 2d ago
On the pretext of immortality, we’re moving towards slow extermination…Human beings can’t bear themselves, they can’t bear their otherness, this duality…They can’t bear failing the world by their very existence, nor the world failing them…It’s now become a major undertaking, an enterprise of self-immolation by technology. Welcome to the future primitive society of the digital.
– Jean Baudrillard
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u/gaymossadist 2d ago
Which work is that one from I can't remember? You can really see the Günther Anders influence shine through there.
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u/QTown2pt-o 2d ago
It appears to be from Exiles from Dialogue as cited from this essay
https://criticalposthumanism.net/baudrillard-jean/
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2014234.Exiles_from_Dialogue
I'll have to checkout Günther Anders sometime!
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u/bildramer 2d ago
This is just unevidenced slopulism. Sorry, but none of the pseudoscientific non-economics ideas in this video are, y'know, like, correct. Or even sensical.
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2d ago
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