We recently had Benjamin Qin give a thought-provoking lecture on my YouTube channel discussing some Post-modern responses to the works of Derrida in the works of Deleuze, Guattari, and Baudrillard.

Here is a short summary of the video, and also the full transcript attached below.

Introduction:

In today’s exploration, we will delve into the profound philosophies of three influential thinkers—Deleuze, Guattari, and Baudrillard. These French intellectuals, situated in the postmodern tradition, extended Derrida’s ideas, applying them to diverse realms such as sociology, politics, economics, and biology.

Four Key Questions:

Our discussion revolves around four pivotal questions, each revealing a unique facet of postmodern thought:

1. Is reality still real?
2. What is value?
3. What is desire?
4. Should thinking be done in an arborescent or rhizomatic way?

Is Reality Still Real?

Jean Baudrillard’s work, particularly “Simulacra and Simulation,” introduces the concept of hyper-reality. In a postmodern context, hyper-reality emerges when a representation or simulacrum becomes as real as, or even replaces, the original. A prime example is social media, evolving from representing reality to influencing and shaping it, blurring the lines between the virtual and the real.

What is Value?

Baudrillard’s exploration of value transcends traditional paradigms. In “Oral Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign,” he introduces “sign value.” This revolutionary concept asserts that in postmodernity, people no longer solely value objects for their use or monetary worth; instead, their significance is determined by their sign value. A Gucci bag, for instance, symbolizes social status, detached from its functional or monetary value.

What is Desire?

Contrary to Freudian concepts, Deleuze and Guattari, in “Anti-Oedipus,” posit that desire is not born from lack but is a productive force. Desiring machines, interconnected entities at a social level, produce desire collectively. Postmodern desire is complex, shifting, and constantly creating and destroying connections in the social environment.

Arborescent vs. Rhizomatic Thinking:

Deleuze and Guattari challenge traditional, arborescent thinking, advocating for a rhizomatic approach in “A Thousand Plateaus.” They argue that postmodernity requires a more interconnected, systemic understanding. While arborescent thinking offers clear hierarchies, rhizomatic thinking acknowledges the complex, interconnected nature of postmodern relationships.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, these postmodern philosophies challenge conventional notions, inviting us to rethink reality, value, desire, and the very structure of our thoughts. Embracing the complexities of a rhizomatic perspective, we navigate the interconnected web of postmodern ideas.

Full Transcript:

Hello, everyone.
So today, we’ll be talking about three thinkers, Deleuze, Guattari, and Baudrillard.
In the image, you can see Deleuze on the top left, Guattari on the top right, and Baudrillard on the bottom.
And these are all three key French thinkers in the postmodern tradition who expanded the postmodern ideas of Derrida and applied them to sociology, politics, and also merged them with other disciplines like economics and biology.
So overview of today, we’ll be discussing four key questions.
First, is reality still real?
What is value?
What is desire?
And should thinking be done in an arborescent or rhizomatic way?
And we’ll be approaching these questions through the ideas of those three thinkers, Deleuze, Guattari, and Baudrillard.
So is reality still real?
Jean Baudrillard argued in his book Simulacra and Simulation, which is his most famous work, that in post-majority there has been a fast emergence of what he terms hyper-realities.
A hyper-reality is the condition where a simulacrum, which he defines as a copy or representation of reality, becomes equally as real.
replacing the reality or making it indistinguishable from the reality itself.
So this isn’t simply a mere representation of something.
Like, for example, if you see an apple and you draw a painting of that apple in a realist way, it’s not a hyperreal representation of the apple because a hyperreal representation of the apple would be able to be confused with the original apple itself and perhaps also replace that
So an example of hyperreality is social media, which began as a model of reality, but then gradually became a model for reality as the ideas of social media and those real life become indistinguishable and people become more and more influenced by social media.
Originally, social media was a way to share the experiences of people in their day-to-day lives, and therefore it’s a model of reality because it represents that reality.
But then it became a model for reality because unrealistic ideas and standards of beauty and happiness became spread through social media.
And these then determined the ways in which people now wanted to live their lives.
And therefore, social media began as a model of reality and then proceeded to become a model for reality.
and is therefore a hyper-reality, it replaces that reality and becomes indistinguishable from reality itself as the ideas that spread and are originated from social media are now hard to separate from the ideas of reality as the two have become too interconnected.
And so on the top image, you can see an image of the classic analogy of Plato’s cave, where the cave dwellers are only able to see shadows of the real world and not the real world
But in this sense, the shadows themselves determine the objects from which the shadows originate from.
And so the effect precedes the cause.
And in a way, the shadows are equally as real as the original objects themselves, at least in a postmodern context.
So now we’ll be talking about what value is, and this is also one of the primary focuses of Baudrillard’s philosophy.
So Baudrillard argues in his book, Oral Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, that capitalist consumers no longer buy things for how useful they are or for their monetary value, but instead for their sign value.
So in classical Marxist theory, the determination of value from use is known as use value.
and the determination of value based on monetary value is roughly equivalent to what marks terms exchange value and so classically there’s only been use value and exchange value as the two main ways of determining how valuable something is but baudrillard wrote in this book that there is now something called sign value which
has almost become much more important than use value and monetary value.
And so now, in a sense, use value and monetary value are themselves determined by our perception of sign value, just as the exchange value of an object is correlated, at least in some cases, to its use.
So for example, a machine which works much more efficiently than another machine would be priced more highly, at least in a general sense.
So the sign value of a commodity is how much it signifies a sense of social prestige, which is usually detached from the essence of the commodity itself.
So what I mean by this is the sign value of it is unrelated to its use value and it’s unrelated to its monetary value.
And the sign value is something that exists completely in and of itself.
and is sometimes not even related to the commodity itself and is something that’s completely separate yet influences the way we perceive that commodity.
So, for example, it’s a Gucci bag, which gives the feeling of high social status because it’s viewed as something only high class people have.
And consequently, this view of a Gucci bag as something of high value.
The Gucci bag will also correspondingly have a high monetary value.
and therefore have a higher use value in the sense that it can be used to communicate the wealth or social status of the person.
This sign value can be said to be detached from the Gucci bag itself because there exists many other types of bags which in my opinion are equally as aesthetically pleasing and useful and perhaps even more useful
Like you can have a bag with many more pockets or some cool feature which isn’t as expensive but has a lower signed value and is therefore valued less in postmodern society.
And Baudrillard also contends that in postmodern dirty tea, the use values and exchange values themselves become forms of signed values, which is something I talked about earlier.
So for example, something with a high signed value can lead it to be priced highly and be useful for signifying wealth.
So like with the Gucci bag.
and he wrote in for a critique of the political economy of the sign that everything even artistic intellectual and scientific production even innovation and transgression is immediately produced as sign and exchange value relational value of the sign so it shows that now even exchange value is determined through its relation to the sign value and in fact
all aspects of life in post-modernity seems to be consumed and determined by this perception of sign value so mentions art like the intellectual and the scientific innovation transcription so
Yeah, everything has become determined by sign value in the postmodern age, and this goes against earlier ideas of use value and exchange value.
Now we’ll move on to discussing some ideas that are based more in the philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari.
So what is desire?
So the classic Freudian conception of desire is that it arises from a lack of the desired.
For example, you desire water because you are thirsty or lacking water.
So desire is something that arises through lack or through loss.
And this is partly why there’s the classic Buddhist idea of
attachment being the root of suffering because when you’re attached to something and that thing is removed then you will feel disappointed and it will be said at least according to freudian theory that your desire for that thing will increase due to your lack of it and this is why people have nostalgia because they are lacking
the experience of something that they used to enjoy.
And this is why people are homesick as well, because they are lacking access to their home.
However, in their book Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari reverse this Freudian idea and create their concept of desiring productions.
Basically, instead of desire arising through lack, they theorize that desire is actually something that’s produced and is not created through absence, but instead is used to fill up that absence and to create something new entirely.
So they argue that desire is a productive force.
So you desire water because you want to produce and create water in your body.
And this means that desire is viewed in more of a positive way and viewed more in terms of the consequences of desire rather than the intentions behind desire.
So it can be seen as a more scientific way of viewing desire in a sense.
And desiring production is done by what they call desiring machines.
And Deleuze and Guattari think that desiring machines can never exist by themselves, but only in a larger network of desiring machines, which they call the social machine.
And it’s also important to note here that a desiring machine doesn’t necessarily have to refer to a single human being, but can refer to institutions or particular groups of humans.
And that’s why they use the term machine instead of just human or individual or subject.
which are terms used in classical psychoanalysis.
And hence, desires in postmodernity are no longer driven by an individual, but by their social environment, which is why commodities with high sign values leading to barter are desired.
so this means that desire is now not something that’s uniquely tied to the individual and is not something that’s unique to a single person but desire is viewed as something more collective and more productive and so desires can easily change and shift and be newly created and newly destroyed
So desire has now become a much more complex concept with the arrival of the postmodern age.
And this idea of larger interconnections linking every individual part to every other part, such as the idea of the desiring machine and its ties to the social machine, links to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, which was developed in the book following on to Anti-Oedipus called The Thousand Plateaus.
So Deleuze and Guattari, they collaborated on this two book series known as Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and the first book was Ante-Oedipus, and the second was A Thousand Plateaus.
So should thinking be done in an arborescent or rhizomatic way?
So in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that thinking has traditionally always been done in an arborescent or tree-like way, clear beginnings and ends, and different ideas branch out into others, which then branch out further.
So it’s a way of thinking that is very ordered, very structured, and has a clear hierarchy and sequence of events. So for example, if we think about the history of Christianity, we have the first division of Christianity into Catholic and the Orthodox churches, and then we have the further divide within the Catholic church into Catholicism, and then into Protestantism, and then we have the different branches within Protestantism, and then we have different traditions that moved out of the Orthodox church, and so there’s a clear order, even if it becomes more complex over time.
And Deleuze and Guattari argue that to understand postmodernity, one needs to stop thinking in an arborescent way, and instead in a rhizomatic way, because they argue that in the postmodern age, things are much less ordered and simple, and everything is interconnected, like the desiring machines.
We need a much more grand and comprehensive way of systemically cognizing more complex relationships between things in post-modernity. So let’s think about the word rhizome itself. In biology, a rhizome is a system of interconnected roots, which you can see in the image underneath the image of the tree. And in a rhizome, every root connects to every other root, and a root can only have meaning when contextualized within the larger system of roots. And if the rhizome is broken, it could also easily restart itself.
So this is contrary to a tree, where not every part of the tree connects to every other part.
and the tree can have its individual parts separated and we can still understand the meaning of those parts of the tree. And Deleuze and Guattari believed that the rhizome is the structure of many things in the postmodern age, and an example of this is the internet. They also think that society itself is a rhizome which leads them to conclude that in the postmodern age there is no longer a distinction between the individual and the collective so they leave with this grand conclusion that the society equals the individual at least when conforming to postmodern and the unique conditions which govern the postmodern age.
So that is it for today.
Thank you.