Research talk:5¢/YT/BaudrillardPostmodernStockMarket

The Death of the Economy: Baudrillard's Financial Simulacrum

channel: SoyGnostic Philosophy (pronounced proposed / ES)1-1-1
field, scope, or group [Item]: postmodern philosophy (pronounced proposed / ES)1-1-1; postmodern economics (pronounced proposed / ES)1-1-1

Links

YouTube: [1]

Nickel usage or significance

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Motifs or claims

It is appropriate to use Baudrillard to analyze the economy -> why do people think this? if I'm not mistaken, he didn't even write about economics.
truth value: not likely true due to possible category error.
Many of Baudrillard's early works were about economics -> this feels like it needs to be tested, and like it could actually be false. find one work by Baudrillard that is supposedly about economics and analyze it, and if it clearly is not saying anything relevant to economics in a serious material way then the probability of all Baudrillard's "early works" not being about economics goes up.
Revenue is a test of whether something works in reality [2] -> it's somewhat fair to slam that one because it doesn't cover things like whether a product is novel versus old, in-print versus out-of-print; something that is highly useful and effective could make next to no profit at all precisely because it doesn't drive growth and speculation.
postmodern economics -> well, I didn't think this was even possible, but the postmodernists showed me I guess.
consumerism (postmodern economics) [3] -> didn't know this one was a separate motif either! postmodernists are really telling on themselves with these videos.
Most stock trading is not done by humans but by algorithms [4] -> so... when people say it's not possible to predict the future, or not possible to predict the economy, why do these exist?
The economy mostly moves in response to other signals within the system [5] -> isn't that how all material objects work, though? no acknowledgement of dialectical materialism / special relativity. this is one of the bluest statements I've ever seen.
Illusion can exist where it does not announce itself as illusion; it can exist outside media and culture [6] -> all right, technically true.
I do have a silly question though: how can you be a postmodernist and believe that hidden illusions can actually exist and maliciously deceive people if you can't know what's illusion and what's real in the first place? Marx can figure out there are hidden illusions but... for a postmodernist, haven't they already said that the existence of illusions is just their own opinion? how is discovering illusions actually in any way actionable if you view things that way? haven't you set up a framework where it's a perfectly valid "opinion" to be deceived and you can't tell people they shouldn't want to be deceived?
Expectations of expectations float around above reality -> no.
Fiat currency is a signifier
Fiat currency is a floating signifier [7] -> hmm! that's an actually interesting claim. I'm not sure it's true. and I'm not sure this is an economics statement rather than a psychology statement, either.
fiat currency actually does something, however minimal. there's a real difference between a dysfunctional Third World currency that's wildly inflated and the US dollar. the US dollar is doing something the broken currency isn't doing. the ratio between the US dollar and the broken currency reflects some actual relationship between the population with the functioning fiat currency and the population with the broken one. I don't think I can say more than that with certainty, but I do love to idly think about what might be happening there.
Fiat currency "technically" has a referent / 1 dollar bill refers to the value of n used books / N dollar bills refer to M loaves of bread -> you can't get much for a dollar bill these days but sometimes you can get a used item.
Fiat currency is able to represent multiple levels of value because numbers (cents; yen or yuan values; etc) are defined relative to each other -> wow. linguists just discovered basic arithmetic.
I wouldn't be so sarcastic about this if Deleuze and Guattari hadn't really actually forgotten how to count. I don't trust linguists to know how to count any more.
Fiat currency finds its value on the signifier side of economic language / Fiat currency finds its value on the referential side (signifier side) of the equation (sign equation)
Linen refers to nothing / Fiat currency finds its value on the signifier side of economic language in Marxist economics -> I'm going to have to stop you there before you get through the rest of this video. no! I have read enough of Capital to know that is completely misquoting Marx. Marx doesn't even use fiat currency to describe the values of commodities. he uses abstract units of labor, which are a completely different unit on a different layer of reality. this allows the surplus value gap to exist. there may be small amounts of uncertainty associated with determining how much "real effort" goes to how much product in each industry that bubble up into comparisons between industries, but that isn't a big problem. the surplus value gap is the more interesting observation, particularly in regard to Baudrillard's whole "floating signifier" thing. the nether side of that gap is already much closer to reality than he is, even if it hasn't gotten all the way down to the bottom.
sure. maybe fiat currency is a little detached from reality. but you can't really fake labor hours or even territory-exclusivity hours. you can't fake people seeing a product that looks to have come from a lot of sourcing hours, competition hours, or craftsmanship hours versus seeing a product that looks to have come from few of those hours. the dragon process is quite real, in that the average person can distinguish novel kinds of labor or competition from "AI slop". if exchange value was truly attached to nothing then people wouldn't mind AI books because all they would see is that they'd been repeatedly fed the idea that a particular level of technique is a particular level of valuable. but if you show them an AI book they get mad that you've shown them "~~pronounced censored~~". why? can you explain that?

Motifs or claims (in Baudrillard)

Symbolic Exchange and Death (Baudrillard 1976) [8]
floating signifier / extermination of references and finalities (of final references; of referents) / mere information signals devoid of material content / the digital, programmatic sign, which has a purely tactical value (sic)
the code (Symbolic Exchange and Death)
structuralist linguistics and economics / linguistic structuralism and economics -> that's somewhat okay because structuralist linguistics was basically describing the relationship between words and reality, how words have to shift with shifting material contradictions/antagonisms. so the question is, how did Baudrillard ruin it?
Commodity value is defined relative to other commodities -> wow, what a breakthrough!!
Picture is not pipe / A signified object is not a referent (Saussure) / A signified object (phenomenon; mental object; replica image; thought; mental model; narrative) is not a referent (noumenon; physical object; material object; universe); this is to imply that the signified object beneath a signifier (name; term; symbol; arbitrary identifier; outward object identity; outward object-kind identity; metaphysical identity of object) is an ontological model composed of propositions

Subjective themes

Baudrillard isn't a real postmodernist -> if he actually distinguishes between reality and simulations enough to accuse the economy of improperly being a simulation, then is he really doing postmodernism? or is this just post-structuralism or something? {{li|I=S2/MX|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}The existence of fan fiction disproves Baudrillard -> I'm serious. the fact there is really actually a correct answer to a lot of questions about whether characters are in character (though not all of those questions; a few are subjective) means that symbols don't really refer to nothing. the difference between correct answer and incorrect answer is one cause for fan fiction existing.
Game theory isn't real (Baudrillard) / Game theory problems are detached from society -> game theory and so-called "feedback processes" are a consequence of physics, more than a lot of postmodernist theories are a consequence of physics, really.
floating signifier / the digital, programmatic sign, which has a purely tactical value -> does he think photons exchanged between physical objects have a purely tactical value, too?
Petty producers are workers (Baudrillard) / Because novelists work directly with the layer of labor hours and not with the top layer of signifiers (stocks, fiat currency), petty producers are workers (postmodern economics) -> "that doesn't sound correct [[E:that doesn't sound right, but I don't know enough about stars to dispute it|but I don't know enough about Baudrillard to dispute it"
adding the Soviet bureaucracy to economic equations -> this sounds like a ~~pronounced censored~~ but I'm quite serious. when you have capitalism proper the economy is all chunked up into separate islands (eco-nomics = laws of house-islands), but when you have as much as the Soviet bureaucracy things are more directly connected to each other, and the "cybernetic feedback arena" won't behave exactly the same as it did before.
The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left: A Marxist Critique (David North) [9] [10]
Baudrillard broke with Marxism in the 1970s, or at least shortly after 1968; this is not to imply that he believed in Marxism before, but is only to state that he was not a Marxist (Leninist; Communist; Bolshevik) in 1976 [11]