Jean Baudrillard’s concept of “symbolic exchange” represents an important concept in understanding why Marx’s prediction regarding the collapse of capitalism has not been realized. Baudrillard adds to the Marxian concepts of use value and exchange value, suggesting that, in today’s consumer‐oriented society, commodities take on a symbolic value that constitutes their “status” and, therefore, power. In the Western industrial societies that are “networked” into information cultures, the generation of symbolic value results from a constantly changing symbolic environment in which new demands for access to symbolic status are generated. Baudrillard sees the United States as the farthest along on the path to a simulated environment of symbolic exchange. Manufacturing for symbolic exchange is directed toward the production of the fetish: an object that is positioned purely for its symbolic value. By directing production increasingly in the direction of the fetish, as an object to be used in symbolic exchange, capitalism is able to sustain itself even after the material needs of the population are satisfied.
Critical responses to Cormac McCarthy's Child of God have tended, in recent years, toward more sympathetic accounts of Lester Ballard, the novel's necrophiliac, serial killer protagonist. Scholars such as Edwin Arnold, Dianne Luce, John Lang, and Alexandra Blair contend that Ballard's behavior is best understood as a reaction to communal and societal pressures. While compelling, this reception focuses, almost exclusively, on Lester and his mistreatment by both the community and social institutions like the state. Yet if Ballard's behavior stems from victimization by large-scale social forces, it follows that every resident of Sevier County must be victimized by these same forces. Hence, this paper offers an analysis of the novel focused on the community of Sevier County as a whole. More specifically, we argue that Child of God asserts a devastating critique of the possibility of community, Lester being an extreme reaction to what is, in actuality, the widespread loss of community brought about by the systematic violence of deindustrialization, individualism, patriarchy, and so forth. Hence, Child of God proves less a tale of the murderous perversions of Lester Ballard and more a horror story of the inability for humans to flourish under existing social relations.
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