Even signs must burn
from semiotics and the modern city to Jean Baudrillard's symbolic exchange and the postmodern city
pp. 725-740
in: International handbook of semiotics, Berlin, Springer, 2015Abstract
The major concern of this chapter involves three independent yet interconnected research themes: semiotics, postmodern sociology and the city. Typically, semiotics and semiology have offered in the past various ways for theorizing a variety of activities and interests, from language, to culture, art and the built environment. In dealing with Marxism, nevertheless, and the radical turn of urban studies of the 1970s, the tension between semiology and historic materialist approaches remained tenuous and tentative. The chapter on the face of this difficulty is divided into three parts: (a) Based on Sausserian semiotics and the Marxist problematic, it discusses how the city is seen under a semiotics Marxist lens, arguing that this is a modern way to come to terms with space and geography which performs a twofold deficiency: a base/superstructure difficulty and a metaphysical use/exchange value difficultly; (b) in the second part, the dualities of base/superstructure and use/exchange value, seen more as problematizations rather than problems, are given over to a systemic theory of the consumer society and (c) the third part of the chapter concludes by referring to the consequences of this surrendering for the city, modern and postmodern, by way of symbolic exchange.
