Baudrillard is super flawed---his lack of explanation for the dead’s disintegration into the capitalist economy as well as endless speaking about death misdiagnoses the source of violence and fetishizes death which is way worse.

A New Time of Death? 25 Capitalism is organised around market exchanges in which goods are exchanged through the medium of money. The emphasis is often on the fairness of exchange, on the idea that the market-place adjusts prices through competition, and on anonymous exchange where the producers of goods and their consumers are separated in space and time. What has been lost in this market-based exchange is the idea of symbolic exchange. This is a form of exchange which is not based on getting something equal in return for what we spend but exchange as an unbalanced and excessive social process. The classic example of symbolic exchange is that of gift-giving, in particular the Native American practice of potlatch. The word is from the Chinook language and means ‘to give’. It is the name for a ceremonial feast of north- west coast tribes at which the host distributed his possessions as gifts to his guests. These gifts could be material things like blankets and furniture, but also food, and they would win honour for the host. What interested anthropologists in this gift-giving was that it could also seemingly run out of control, with whole villages being made destitute in trying to provide gifts. Capitalism replaces this form of exchange, which is based on social prestige and direct personal relationships, with forms of exchange based on calculation and the anonymity of the market. For Baudrillard this eclipse of symbolic exchange also affected our relationship with death. As symbolic exchange is destroyed, including our exchanges with the dead, so ‘little by little, the dead cease to exist’ (Baudrillard, 1993: 126). Once we had exchanges with the dead, we traded or bargained with them, or made offerings to them. This extends to practices like the Irish wake, when a party would be held while the body of the dead was still in the house to celebrate the life of the deceased. Now, the dead are excluded, we remove them as rapidly as possible to be buried or cremated and mourning rituals have also been curtailed. Baudrillard argues that we can never completely eliminate symbolic exchange or our dealings with the dead. The more we try to exclude the dead the more they return in traumatic forms. Perhaps the modern fashion for zombie films, such as the trilogy of George A. Romero, Night of the Living Dead (1969), Dawn of the Dead (1979) and Day of the Dead (1985), is a sign of this? What is interesting is that in the second film of the trilogy, Dawn of the Dead, the zombies invade that bastion of capitalist culture the shopping mall (although they seem strangely pacified by the muzak!). 26 The Culture of Death What is also interesting is that this film is the one from the trilogy that has recently been remade. In a sense death takes its revenge on us as, for Baudrillard, death can never be fully programmed or contained by the postmodern society of images. The dead resist the process of exchange and cannot be fully integrated into the capitalist economy. This is despite the fact that, as Nancy Mitford pointed out in her 1963 book The American Way of Death (1998), a scathing exposé of funeral home practices, there is a great deal of money to be made in the funeral business. Baudrillard emphasised that this return of the dead would force us to rediscover symbolic exchange or we would be left with a culture that had become terminal. Either we deal with the dead through symbolic exchange, or we become the living dead, like the zombie consumers of Dawn of the Dead. His work is almost a parody of those radical thinkers of the 1960s who tried to find resistance in those who could not be integrated into the system, whether that was women, students, lesbians and gays, petty criminals or African-Americans. It seems as if, for Baudrillard, the dead are the only ones who cannot be integrated! The problem with his model is that it offers no real explanation for why death comes to invade our whole culture. His idea of a radical reversal, when what is excluded returns in a more virulent form, is extremely hard to pin down concretely. This leaves his argument ungrounded and it is no surprise that it has been greeted with scepticism. In comparison, whatever criticisms we might want to make of it, Agamben’s analysis of our exposure to death is more concretely grounded. The increasing exposure to death in modern culture is understood as the result of the act of sovereign power that creates bare life, a life exposed to death. In modern culture this production of bare life has spread because bare life has become the ground of our political identity. Agamben does not regard death as some point of resistance that somehow lies outside our culture. In treating death as a point of resistance Baudrillard is in danger of turning death into some sort of authentic experience where we can find, or recover, our true values. In fact, the exposure to death in modern culture seems to be, as we shall see later in this book, a far more banal and everyday process. Baudrillard’s model does explore our exposure to death in modern culture but it seems to offer no adequate explanation for that exposure. Instead A New Time of Death? 27 it offers something like a magical or metaphysical thinking where what is excluded can only ever return in a more extreme form. Agamben provides an analysis which is more precise but which is also not beyond criticism. If Baudrillard’s thesis has proven controversial and been treated with scepticism then so have Agamben’s claims. In particular, his history of bare life has faced five major criticisms. The first is that Agamben’s theory concerning bare life is not well supported by the historical evidence and that he is selective in the evidence he draws on. Secondly, that Agamben’s history of bare life is too straightforward, too linear, and so doesn’t really deal with the complex nature of the social history of death. Thirdly, that in only studying Western culture Agamben is ethnocentric, and that he excludes evidence from other cultures and tends to treat Western culture as a monolithic whole. Fourthly, that Agamben’s model of biopolitics tends to erase the important distinctions between different political systems, especially between democracies and totalitarian states. And, finally, that he does not consider in enough depth the different experiences of exposure to death, or the fact that this exposure to death is unevenly distributed.