{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","title":"Critical Theory of Communication New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781911534044","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","id":"dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","uuid":"dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","title":"Critical Theory of Communication New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet","normalized_title":"criticaltheoryofcommunicationnewreadingsoflukácsadornomarcusehonnethandhabermasintheageoftheinternet","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781911534044","isbns":["9781911534044","9781911534051","9781911534068","9781911534075"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":236,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Critical%20Theory%20of%20Communication%20New%20Readings%20of%20Luk%C3%A1cs%2C%20Adorno%2C%20Marcuse%2C%20Honneth%20and%20Habermas%20in%20the%20Age%20of%20the%20Internet","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611/search"},"page":{"printed_page":183,"pdf_page":187,"physical_index":187,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"a41378912a2bcdb6e4368596c3754c61c2c11a2b126677d1f6768ee7c8a03d85"},"chapter":"C H R I S T I A N F U C H S CRITICAL THEORY OF COMMUNICATION","content":"Baudrillard basically argues that the economy and production are material, whereas culture and consumption are for him immaterial. The most basic question that philosophy and indeed also religion ask is: What is the world? Why does it exist? How does it exist? There can either be one or several fundamental substances that the world is made of and through which it transforms itself. If there is more than one, then there must be some causal relation between them. If one assumes that a spiritual substance (such as God) either exists besides and outside of matter or determines matter, then the world cannot be explained in the first instance because the question arises: who created the God-like spirit?\n\nIf we in contrast assume that matter is the process-substance of the world, is its own cause (causa sui), and has the capacity to produce and organise itself, then a diferent explanation of the world becomes possible: The world is matter-in-process that produces itself, is its own origin, and has the capacity to produce new organisational levels. Such reasoning also implies that there is no God because any assumption of the existence of God is an over-specification of theory that is unnecessary. Separating mind from matter, as Baudrillard does, cannot adequately explain the world’s origin and development.\n\nThe human brain is a material system connected to the human body. A human’s semiosis ceases when s/he dies. S/he can then no longer interpret the world and give meaning to it. We cannot see thoughts, but they are tied to a material substratum (the brain) that makes them material. They are intangible and non-physical, but material. We can also materialise thoughts in the form of textual, visual, audio, audio-visual forms that are stored in some material. The immaterial does not exist. Information is a specific form of matter. It is real and material, although it is more often non-physical and intangible than physical and tangible.\n\n6.3.3. Sign Value as Replacement, Collapse and Abolition of Economic Value\n\nBaudrillard does not, as for example Habermas, dualistically separate the economic and the symbolic, but rather reduces labour and the economic to the sign and culture. Sign value would replace economic value, symbolic manipulation would replace exploitation:\n\nIt is a matter of the passage of all values to exchange-sign value, under the hegemony of the code. […] [The sign] is an operational structure that tends itself to a structural manipulation compared with which the quantitative mystery of surplus value appears inofensive. The superideology of the sign […] has replaced good old political economy as the theoretical basis of the system (Baudrillard 1975, 121–122).\n\nThe sign would have become the hegemonic reality. ‘The sign no longer designates anything at all. […] All reality then becomes the place of a semi-urgical manipulation, of a structural simulation’ (Baudrillard 1975, 128). All reality has for Baudrillard become symbolic. The economic would collapse into the symbolic: the ‘structural configuration of value simply and simultaneously puts an end to the regimes of production, political economy, representation and signs. With the code, all this collapses into simulation’ (Baudrillard 1993, 8). Production would collapse into culture and consumption: ‘The entire sphere of production, labour and the forces of production must be conceived as collapsing into the sphere of “consumption”, understood as the sphere of a generalised axiomatic, a coded exchange of signs, a general lifestyle’ (Baudrillard 1993, 14). The economy and politics would turn into hyperreality: ‘the two spheres are abolished in another reality or media hyperreality’ (Baudrillard 1993, 65).\n\nBeyond Habermas: Rethinking Critical Theories of Communication\n\n183","previous_page":182,"next_page":184}