The Joy of Resistance: Ep. 4 - Sign Value and Recuperation

One of the significant challenges of our current environment is that our own imaginations have been turned against us. Much of our needs come from our imaginations and are very much focused on the way acts and products signify - their sign value. What this means is that our very real desire for change ends up being recuperated and being sold back to us products that reinforce the very system we wish to change. Traditional skills and ways of living become “Trad Wife”, anti-capitalist movements are sold back to us in posters and t-shirts, and despair becomes a market opportunity. In this environment, the imagination becomes a central territory for understanding and, importantly, enacting resistance.

Books I mention in the lecture:

Karl Marx, Das Kapital Volume 1

Jean Baudrillard Simulacra and Simulation (warning, English Translation is a bit dodgy and the early Semiotext(e) edition is incomplete and hence confusing (or more confusing, it is plenty confusing in French))

Jean Baudrillard Symbolic Exchange and Death

Georges Bataille The Accursed Share

George Orwell 1984 (The Appendices are written retrospectively about the world of Oceania and Newspeak that did not endure)

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