| Bar Games: Baudrillard's Encounters With The Sign investigates the ways in which the French writer Jean Baudrillard has attacked the interpretive institutions of semiology and structuralism and deconstructed Saussurean and Lacanian signs by playing what I call bar games. Chapter 1 consists of a literature review of Baudrillard's reception in the English-speaking world by art critics, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, and critical theorists. In Chapter 2, I trace the influence of theatre on Baudrillard's theoretical development and employ concepts from Prague School semiotics to elucidate his idea of the 'revenge of things'. In Chapter 3, I reinterpret Baudrillard's model of the stages of simulation as a condensed history of modern semiotic debate on the status of the referent by describing its four stages in terms of four different kinds of signs across two semiotic spectrums (Saussurean and Peircean). I raise the stakes of the bar games of poststructuralism in Chapter 4 by developing a strong reading of Saussure's concept of positive difference; I use this 'foil' against Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jacques Lacan. I analyze Baudrillard's anti-semiological concept of the symbolic and his typology of bars by unpacking his 'Table of Conversions' between political economy and semiology. Chapter 5 concerns Baudrillard's unsuccessful efforts to avoid mysticism and reaffirm magisterial theory in the register of hypoweakness. Baudrillard's tactical devices of le Witz, anagram, potlatch, death, and seduction define hypoweakness anti-semiologically. I argue in Chapter 6 that Baudrillard's representations of America are guided by the concepts of the desert and exoticism in French thought, as well as by his concept of 'hostage value'. |
