[Breaking glass]
[The famously dorkish 'Wilhelm Scream']
[A low metallic pulse]
[The pulse rises]
[The pulse rises and reverberates as dramatic, action-movie-esque music fades in]
[Retro computerised blips]
Newscaster 1: Unimaginable. Unbelievable.
1: that in the most famous city of the richest country in the world they're digging mass graves
Newscaster 2: You have death rates now. They are going to go up
Newscaster 3: Those numbers are going to go up
3: The closer people get to one another, the more deaths we're going to see
2: –was saying it would be sixty-something
2: It's already passed that, but the president now says eighty thousand or ninety thousand, maybe a hundred thousand
Newscaster 4: more Americans are going to soon be dead
2: Death projections–
4: [distorted]. Death projections–
4: [distorted, slowing] Death projections—
4: [distorted, slowing, stretching] Death projections...
You're back. I'm back. We're both dying.
Here's a second 'Philosophy of Death' à la Plastic Pills
The last vid covered Heidegger's 'being-towards-death'
Real proper philosophy, right?
And while I wish that phenomenology still had the gravitas it probably deserves
Lately, I feel like these post-structuralist applications feel more relevant, applicable, even true
In advanced programs academics don't tend to read Baudrillard all that much
He's not taken all that seriously – mainly because he writes polemically, instead of using arguments, most of the time
In the online social world though, polemics also get you further than arguments do
and even more than the form of debate (and maybe this is just my own sensibility)
but it feels like the phenomenal world has fallen into screens and there's a sense of loss in that fallenness
A loss of the thickness and friction that you might expect the world to have
That's probably the reason this is my fifth video on Baudrillard
Baudrillard writes in 'Symbolic Exchange and Death' that:
So here commodities are exchanged, to be sure, but their 'use value' and 'exchange value', from classical economics
(Y'know, basic 'supply and demand')
...are replaced because everything is over-produced, such that now the value that is exchanged is symbolic
and it over-codes both use and exchange value
Symbolic exchange does not only apply to commodities though. It also applies to the facts of reality
including the most factical of facts
Death. That we are going to die.
[Buzzing, whirring, a computer shutting down]
On our screens, death is abstracted and modelled into graphs
and accompanied by prescriptions of how you should live to avoid it
The way these are presented, the only purpose of life is avoiding death
X hours of exercise per week, prescribed diets and warnings against anything which may cause your life to be shortened
Death, for us, is the opposite of health. It's sickness
and this is unique in human history!
No culture before ours has ever been so averse to death, our one guarantee
Here's what other cultures have done with death
The difference between them and us is that, for them, death signifies something
For us, it's a negation. It only has a negative value: the absence of health
Don't mistake this for romanticizing 'la pensée sauvage' (the savage mind) here
They surely prohibit other signs from having meaning but the notable feature of us is that we prohibit death from having symbolic value
It's a sort of theme of post-structuralism that societies, or sign-systems in this case, are in large part defined by what they repress and banish
For Foucault, for example, mad societies banish the mad to asylums
For Baudrillard, dying societies banish 'living' – the exchange is for mere survival
Survival at all costs, even if it means uploading your brain into the cloud
Part of valuing death, conversely, is knowing how to live.
In other sign-societies, death is not opposed to human being
Death may even give an individual more power, a boost in social status
Reverence in death, from which you can guide the living – y'know ancestor worship
For us, death has no meaning.
So we have a rather unusual attitude towards death, relative to the breadth of social systems that have existed
Those that are more symbolic with respect to death also tend to be more collectivist
such that even the dead are included in everyday life
According to Boudrillard,
There is a medical definition of death, one we're familiar with, but there are many others as well
Death can be a graduation.
Death can be merely a part of a reversible cycle
Modern bureaucratic routinization strips meaning out of death to turn it into metrics, measurements of efficacy, leadership or a bio political testing mechanism.
It is now composed of graphics for the benefit of a consumer society
Of course, it sounds really reductive to blame capitalism for everything
but this pandemic is I think exposing the subliminal signification of death that's difficult to notice
In plague, we are in the midst of death
and, while that's always true, we are everyday inundated with sensationalized, routinized models
Mortality rates, death curves, statistics
these models draw a morbid fascination
(Otherwise, they wouldn't keep showing them)
as if seeing it there gives it a visible form and somehow gives us power over it
Right, so that's death
Now let's take a look at the dead and the rule that play in a social system
Now, our social relations are largely determined by our relation to capital and labor
Our exclusion of the dead (just like our exclusion of the mad and the elderly, to asylums and nursing homes)
is based on the fact that they can no longer work or produce capital
In virtually all pre-capitalist societies the elderly, the mad and the dead were consulted for their wisdom
(Yes, even the mad – madness was often associated with a connection to the gods or the spirit world)
I rushed over the notion of exclusion or prohibition, as this happens in a sign system
Now, we're familiar with the term 'discrimination'
and there's, y'know, unacceptable forms of discrimination (sexism, racism, ...)
and there's also generally accepted forms
For example, children are not allowed to vote, criminals are incarcerated and others are institutionalized
and these are more or less generally accepted discriminations
And, in each case, something happens called 'ghettoization'
Ghettoization is where you separate a group of people off from society.
It's literal discrimination
Now it's been the norm in human cultures that the dead have a say
One dead Pharaoh and his wives have more value than the whole living population
Other examples: Odysseus gets instructions from his dead friends and a profit on how he's supposed to get home in his titular journey
In the Hebrew Bible (which forbids necromancy) King Saul consults a dead prophet through a witch
Christians ask dead Saints to intercede for them
and the cover of this book shows the Mexican 'Day of the Dead', where you set up shrines, eat with and remember dead ancestors
Outside of these enclaves, though, the dead are disenchanted such that they're not people, for the most part
and that's unique historically
because the dead and our response to them is not an isolated event
It's always social – it represents a change in social status with a 'before' and an 'after'
The dead are often sought for their wisdom and experience, from from past relatives to Saints
For Baudrillard, we are an exception because we discriminate against the dead
and this ghettoization of the dead happens literally, too - this is a modern situation
You can look at the layout of planned cities: graveyards are now pushed to the fringes
whereas back in the day the graveyard was on the church grounds, always in the center of town
Paris, for example, is an interesting case where many of the city's cemeteries were emptied in the late 18th century and moved literally underground
Plagues often bring new meaning to death but ours is nothing like that sacred meaning
These deaths are merely an indicator of bureaucratic performance. It's a metric.
Can you think of anything more banal?
News host throw out these graphs and charts and simply use it as a measure of government response
Death is a metric by which we judge the living
Newscaster: Jim, a grim new death toll and frightening new projections
But the president and his team (at least some members of his team) don't necessarily believe all the numbers
Jim: That's right, well, the tug of war has begun inside the Trump administration
over whether the US is over counting the number of dead from the Coronavirus
PP: South Korea – good job guys!
America – bad president!
Think of what an alien viewpoint that represents in terms of death
Like Baudrillard said, all these piles of dead people are playing a social role as part of this political narrative
[It's] slightly obscene
There's nothing left of this sacred, of course
No concept of death as a journey and no concept of death as a change in social status in a collective
Here's my theory on this: this is because we only view ourselves as individuals
and don't really tend to imagine what death could mean in a collectivist sense
Y'know, like using death as a tool to advance a cause or political project
That's not really part of our imaginary.
Baudrillard does see the positive valuation of death in another group, though:
Terrorists.
This is not to condone terrorism, of course
Yet, they are an example of that positive value of death that we no longer have
For them, death and suicide is a symbolic weapon
The suicide bombing as an act as a symbolic value that cannot be incorporated into the sign system of capitalism and Empire
Suicide is an un-signifiable event, it doesn't have any economic value but they have immense symbolic value
Al Qaeda won the Wars of the 21st century which have been crushing symbolic defeats of the Empire
dragging it into decades of war a world away
indebting it and eroding faith in elected officials
and very publicly destroying the vestiges of the moral superiority, imagined or otherwise, of the empire
Al Qaeda understood symbolic exchange through the surplus value of suicide
More symbolic value than the exchange can handle
Because we do not understand death and because we can't signify it
Baudrillard views the goal of the modern project as the annihilation of death itself
Our imaginary is rife with these sorts of images of us eliminating and overcoming death:
those of cloning, uploading consciousness, and biotechnology to end aging
This should be terrifying. He speculates
Where previous generations suffer alienation future generations face an infinitely worst prospect:
the horror of never knowing death
This is like some Elon Musk fever dream, billionaires ending death
With it, though, we've lost life and that's why I made that previous video on being-towards-death
What are we left with? Without death our projects, personal or social, have lost all urgency
The world wanes and pales
Now, don't think of this as something that will happen when we cure death
It's something that has already happened since death has been disenchanted and yet goes unsignified
Over a hundred and thirty years ago Nietzsche's speculated as to the end-state of the modern project
calling us 'the last men'