I loved Ken Rufo's virtual lecture on Jean Baudrillard. Even though I was intimidated by its length for a moment, once I began reading I found it to be challenging, but worded in such a way that it really helped me to understand the different concepts he was referring to. The examples he gave were great and I actually felt confident after reading it. The concepts of Baudrillard's that Rufo referred to helped me to link different theories we have studied in class by finding some similarities between them. Rufo explained how for Marx the commodity is structured very much like the sign, and how money equates to a pure value of exchange, Baudrillard also suggests that Sausure's semiotics and Marx's critique of capital are very similar. This reminded me of when we were studying Saussure and structuralism in class and Marie stated how money, like the seasons of the year, are a representation and help create a model of a system. Rufo explains that Marxism is just another model and such a simulation ends up inadvertently feeding the idea of production that Marx fought so vigorously against. (I really wonder what Marx would have said in response to a statement like this!) Rufo explains that Baudrillard argues that Marx got it backwards! He also argues that psychoanalysis did not discover the unconscious, but really makes use of it as an expository device...All of these grand statements seemed very bold and gave me the impression that Baudrillard is very interested in teasing out different possibilities and rethinking theories. At the end of the post Rufo listed some interesting things about Baudrillard, one being that he was a professional photographer. I found this very interesting because photographers look for ways to capture reality, their photographs are simulations and reproductions of real people, places, and things. Baudrillard wrote extensively about the pervasiveness of simulations, which made me wonder a bit about his thoughts on photography and film, considering Derrida's vigorous reaction against the capturing and distribution of one's image...