Updates, Live: Semiurgy

Jean Baudrillard
1929 - 2007
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/WikipediaBaudrillard20040612-cropped.png)

I will take here again a fragment from a previous blogpost, as I think a term that was used there needs explanation.

The fragment is a quote from Zygmunt Bauman's Intimations of postmodernity (1992):

In its practical implementation, communism was a system one-sidedly adapted to the task of mobilizing social and natural resources in the name of modernization: the nineteenth-century, steam and iron ideal of modern plenty. It could - at least in its own conviction - compete with capitalists, but solely with capitalists engaged in the same pursuits. What it could not do and did not brace itself to do was to match the performance of the capitalist, market-centered society once that society abandoned its steel mills and coal mines and moved into the postmodern age (once it passed over, in Jean Baudrillard's apt aphorism, from metallurgy to semiurgy; stuck at its metallurgical stage, Soviet communism, as if to cast out devils, spent its energy on fighting wide trousers, long hair, rock music and any other manifestations of semiurgical initiative).

This is the fragment, and the term is semiurgy.

Mikhail Epstein: Semiurgy is the art of creating new signs and sign systems, as opposed to semiotics as the science of signs, and rhetoric as the effective usage of signs. The word semiurge would mean an artisan of signs, the demiurge is the creator of the world.

(quoted in http://semiurgy.tumblr.com/)

Let's take it slowly. To begin, some sources on the web:

The term was used firstly in the works of Jean Baudrillard (French philosopher from the postmodernist epoch) and René Berger (a Swiss, also a philosopher of French expression, also a postmodernist). Which of them coined the term, it's debatable (anyway, each of them started from McLuhan).

So, semiurgy combines semiotics and demiurgy. Semiotics is the science of signs. A demiurge creates the physical objects composing the physical world. Well, the semiurge creates the signs composing our postmodern world (which is a world of signs, if you didn't know). As simple as that!

Fine, only we don't know too well what a sign is.

Here comes Baudrillard, with his object value system (For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 1983). In passing from object to sign he considers four stages:

The first is the functional value of an object; its instrumental purpose. A pen, for instance, writes; and a refrigerator cools.
The second is the exchange value of an object; its economic value. One pen may be worth three pencils; and one refrigerator may be worth the salary earned by three months of work.
The third is the symbolic value of an object; a value that a subject assigns to an object in relation to another subject. A pen might symbolize a student's school graduation gift or a commencement speaker's gift; or a diamond may be a symbol of publicly declared marital love.
The last is the sign value of an object; its value within a system of objects. A particular pen may, while having no added functional benefit, signify prestige relative to another pen; a diamond ring may have no function at all, but may suggest particular social values, such as taste or class.

And, as Bauman uses a metaphor coined by Baudrillard (the passing from metallurgy to semiurgy), we can observe that actually they define the postindustrial society by making a parallel to the industrial society. Signs are defined by making the parallel to objects.

An industrial society operates with physical objects. A postindustrial society operates with signs, which are objects at a more abstract level.

As I understand, all societies can be characterized by their icons. In an industrial society the icon is the number of tones of steel (or of cement, or of butter): if the society produces that amount of tones of steel, everybody's happy: there will be enough steel to have any kind of goods to satisfy people. In a postindustrial society the icon is the hip-hop music: if the rating for hip-hop music is good, everybody's happy: they will buy new electronics (to listen to that music), new clothing (to go to dance), new cars (to be hip-hop tuned), new computers (to download music), the credit will work and the malls will be crowded. Steel is still there, only somewhere in the background, nobody cares any more.

Only icon is icon and keyword is keyword: in the industrial society icon and keyword were the same, steel; in the postindustrial society the icon is hip-hop, the keyword is credit.

And if mass production created and eventually killed the industrial society, will also credit be the creator and the demon?