Review
Author(s): Nick Groom
Review by: Nick Groom
Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 91, No. 3 (Jul., 1996), pp. 689-691
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3734103
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MLR, 91.3, 1996
689
that also applies to 'Beckett Criticism in French' (a mere twenty-two pages) and
'Beckett Criticism in German', these two being corporate enterprises. An exceptionally high level of accuracy obtains throughout, which testifiesto the four scholars
making light of any difficulties they may have experienced in working with very
different materials and traditions, and in collaborating between Canada and
Germany. None of the four has been afraid to make the Critiquegenuinely critical,
which will endear all of them to the general reader, if inevitably not to everyone
working in this field. Only very occasionally is there the sound of an axe grinding,
and on patient examination even these instances have a part to play in the economy
of the whole, animating what might otherwise be threatened with the neutrality of a
catalogue.
Students of Beckett at all levels will be grateful to Murphy, Werner Huber, Rolf
Breuer, and Konrad Schoell for supplying a clear path through a mighty maze. The
reminder of where criticism in French has been successful (most often with the early
'English' Beckett, oddly enough) should prove stimulating to an ambience which
has yet to match Germany and the English-speakingworld in quality contributions.
Almost the only sobering aspect of this admirable enterprise is the thought that at
the present rate of production, it will have to be revised every decade or so. But
even then there is the satisfaction of knowing that the foundations have been laid
and will stand firm.
UNIVERSITYOFREADING
JOHN PILLING
Symbolic Exchange and Death. By JEAN BAUDRILLARD.Trans. by IAIN HAMILTON
GRANT,with an introduction by MIKEGANE. London, Thousand Oaks, CA,
and New Delhi: Sage Publications. 1993. xiv + 254 Pp. f40.
Prior to this pivotal work becoming available,Jean Baudrillard'sdramatic change
of gear between TheMirrorof Production
and TheBeaubourg
Effectwas very difficult for
the English reader to understand. Something had happened in between (Symbolic
ExchangeandDeath)but it was unclear precisely what. It has taken seventeen years
for any decent version of this iconoclastic treatise to appear in English, but now Iain
Hamilton Grant has provided a lucid translation of what Mike Gane describes as
'without doubt Jean Baudrillard's most important book' (p. viii). This is some
fanfare, yet at first sight the work appears to be arrant nonsense. Baudrillardargues
that death is a manifestation of late capitalist ideological control (what he has called
elsewhere 'the political economy of the sign'). One is tempted to refute this in the
style of Samuel Johnson refuting Berkeley: he kicked a stone; readers may be
tempted to kick Baudrillard.
SymbolicExchangeand Death is, however, a labyrinthine work, intricate and
compelling. Baudrillard proposes a manifesto of deconstruction based on the
principle of reversibility: overthrowing the tautologies of totalitarian systems by
pushing them to extremes and stressing their instabilities- working them to death,
in fact. It is a catastrophic rather than a dialectical strategy. Any absolute and
apparently infallible system (of thought, of social control) is already halfway to
irrevocable breakdown, falling prey to its own illusion of totality. Baudrillardderives
his concept of'symbolic exchange' (a term he has subsequently abandoned as being
too loaded with assumptions)from anthropological studies of primitive (that is, precapitalist) societies, and from Situationist 'potlatch' (the extravagant destruction of
goods as an extreme form of gift-exchange). It is a form of transaction in which the
exchange of objects cannot take place in any system without threatening that system
with imminent collapse. The instability of the system, whether the system is
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690
Reviews
economic or semiotic, is due to its inability to control the symbolic, and Symbolic
ExchangeandDeathis devoted to this revolutionarypotential.
Baudrillard argues that society has gone beyond Marxist political economy into
the political economy of the sign: the 'hyperreal'. This has revealed Marxism to be
merely an internal critique of capital and thereby exposed socialism as a semiotic
metamorphosis of capitalism. The code predominates; it matters little what is
produced. But the tyranny of the code can be overthrown by a displacement into
the symbolic, where it can be challenged, reversed, and outbid. And to demonstrate
the instability of the semiotic economy of late capitalism, Baudrillardmischievously
takes the very example of death itself.
He considers the genealogy of racism, which he adapts to death: the village
cemetery is the first ghetto but the dead are gradually exiled further and further
away from the living so eventually they are 'no longer even packed in and shut up
but obliterated' (p. I26). The State's power is manifested as managing economic
(and now simulated) life as the 'objective afterlife':death is simply a social barrier
between the dead and the living, which can exist only in a culture of mortal
discrimination. Death, Baudrillardconcludes, is truly (and ironically)revolutionary:
'If political economy is the most rigorous attempt to put an end to death, it is clear
that only death can put an end to political economy' (p. I87).
Indeed, Baudrillard argues that the symbolic permeates all structural thinking,
and he explains how Saussure'smuch-ridiculed interest in anagrams and anaphones
is another instance of the symbolic as a spectre haunting structurallinguistics. It is
in the symbolic that the 'poetic' resides, able to annihilate the code and exterminate
semiotic meaning, and able to construct (or deconstruct) the world by virtue of its
anti-material state. The symbolic, already immanent in Saussure, is inherent within
the whole of semiotic theory, and it is therefore the symbolic, rather than the
Freudianunconscious, that conducts meaning: death (as Baudelaire suggested)gives
meaning to life.
Baudrillard's main inspiration for his models of simulation and his obsessive
attack on Freudo-Marxism are the familiar material semioticians McLuhan and
Benjamin, but he also uses the Situationists. He is effectively transposingdeath in a
Situationist deconstruction of the political economy of the sign, and at the centre of
the crucial chapter 'Political Economy and Death' his first, epigraphic recourse is to
Raoul Vaneigem. This Situationist context means that we should not underestimate
the gallows humour of Baudrillard'sdeconstruction of death, because it is how he
avoids tautology. If Baudrillard is a Marxist, he is of the Groucho sort. His
enthusiastic sloganeering, ('Production is dead, long live reproduction!'), his
description of ancient races demanding 'the right for immortality for all', and his
account of the revolutionary potential of maximalism ('maximum wage for
minimum labour') all show ways to push systems to their limits.
This attack on the spectacle might already be familiarto the reader of Baudrillard,
but he has never previously articulatedit as a full-blown theory, and this is the major
interest of SymbolicExchangeand Death: it is Baudrillard's political manifesto.
Examples are also familiar (terroristsand hostages, transsexuals, stock-exchange
crashes, the obese, automobile drivers), but at last we can see them integrated as
part of a developed theory. Indeed, there is a meticulous ease with which
illustrations,such as graffitior science-fiction pulp, are employed: Baudrillardis like
a postmodern raconteur of the hyperreal. The ubiquity of his thesis of simulation is
brilliantly conveyed, and powerfully insistent. The coherency and theoretical
deftness of SymbolicExchangeandDeathmeans that with the belated appearance of
this excellent translation, Baudrillard'sideas now need to be reassessed as attempts
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MLR, 91.3, 1996
69I
to recover the process of symbolic ritual.Jean Baudrillardhas not always been well
served by his translatorsin the past ... with this offering the situation has, perhaps,
been reversed.
UNIVERSITYOFEXETER
NICK GROOM
The Yearbookof Langland Studies.Vol. 6. I992; Vol. 7. 1993. Ed. byJOHN A. ALFORD
and M. TERESATAVORMINA.East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press in association
with the College of Arts and Letters, Michigan State University.
ix + 188 pp.; x + 208 pp. C29.50; $51 (each).
I993.
SucheWerkisto Werche:
Essays on PiersPlowman.In Honorof David C. Fowler. Ed. by
MICEALF. VAUGHAN.East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press. I993. ix + 292 pp.
?29.50; $51.
The three volumes under discussion here contain a total of twenty-six essays on
Langland (not counting book reviews, notices, Vincent DiMarco's two annual
bibliographies of PiersPlowmancriticism in the YLSvolumes, and the chronology of
David Fowler's works in his festschrift). This is a smorgasbord indeed for Piers
scholars, generously laid on by Colleagues Press, who continue to host Langland
studies with an indefatigable energy. However, within the confines of a review there
would hardly be space to do more than supply the title and a vague half sentence
about each of these separate pieces, so I have restricted myself to discussion of the
new methodologies that are emerging in Langland studies with reference to a few
essays from each volume. I hope that this will be more useful, especially as it will
point up the burgeoning of manuscript studies everywhere evident in these volumes.
The trend is so strikingas to deserve comment and provoke reflection.
YLSVolume 6 contains two essays which, in different ways, announce that what
British Middle English specialists have been calling 'Manuscript Studies' (since the
late I97os) has finally become fashionable among American Langland scholars. In
America, the methodology takes on a somewhat different shape: it is both less
technical (sometimes, though not necessarily, less thorough), but more dramatically
and often more interestingly attached to larger thematic and historical questions.
The result is a potentially wholesome and invigorating mixture of manuscript
methodologies with other approaches (particularlyNew Historicism and intellectual
history), although the final products are, as yet, a little uneven as a group. Cases in
point in the present volume areJohn Bowers's 'PiersPlowmanand the Police: Notes
toward a History of the Wycliffite Langland' (on Lollardy and the reception of the
poem) and Andrew Galloway's 'PiersPlowmanand the Schools' (on learning and
particularly'practicallearning' in relation to the poem).
Bowers'spiece is the more contentious of the two. The explicitly and unapologetically New Historicist methodology of his piece is relatively unusual, as yet, for
Langland criticism, and can be quite exhilarating in its way. Like the Renaissance
historicist scholars he cites (Montrose, Greenblatt), Bowers is interested less in what
the poem meant to its medieval audience and more in the way it functioned
(especially politically) for them. This makes a nice change, but the difficulty is that
the essay also takes on that freebooting quality for which the vintage New Historicists
have been (too often rightly) criticized. Their notorious 'totalizing' tendency is
evident in the broad brush strokes of Bowers's picture of the poem's medieval
reception: every scrap of available evidence seems pressed into service to make a
Lollard-conscious, Lollard-sympathetic, or Lollard-censoring reader out of nearly
every medieval man, woman, or child who ever held a copy of Piersin his or her
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