Baudrillard’s equation of value with the sign launched a lasting semiotic chain reaction

Evidence

Thus, in what is virtually the paradigm gesture of the new production process, Jean Baudrillard links the formula for exchange and use value (rewritten as a fraction) with the fraction for the sign itself (signifier and signified), thereby inaugurating a semiotic chain reaction whose fallout seems to have continued to the present. His own act of equivalence was no doubt modeled on the genial intuition of the great predecessors in the launching of “structuralism” itself, most notably Lacan, whose identification of the semiotic fraction with the “fraction” produced by the bar separating conscious from unconscious is well known and even more influential. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 848

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete named example useful for the reader’s goal of testing whether the cultural-dominant thesis is falsifiable — the equation-chain is a specific, checkable gesture. — connects to: Baudrillard’s symbolic exchange describes value’s pre-institutional dissolution into smoke — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 519; The semiotic code is the last and most visible secular postmodern idiolect — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 848; Post-structuralist thinkers displaced existentialism by treating philosophy as a game of signs — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 87
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Baudrillard’s symbolic exchange describes value’s pre-institutional dissolution into smoke — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 519; The semiotic code is the last and most visible secular postmodern idiolect — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 848; Post-structuralist thinkers displaced existentialism by treating philosophy as a game of signs — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 87