Baudrillard borrows the theory of Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiology as a resource to establish his theory about a consumptive society. According to Saussure, signs have value only because they are different from other signs within a closed system. In the same way, commodities have value or sense only because of their difference from other commodities and not because of any inherent value in them.

    According to Baudrillard’s theory of a highly consumptive society, the body itself takes on the role of currency through labor or sexuality and becomes an exchangeable commodity for consumption. We cannot say that this is unrelated to Butoh, because from the 1970s, Hijikata worried about the commodification of Butoh leading to its stylish, new contemporary form. I return to Centonze’s essay in which she points out this problem as follows:

Many critics suggest that buto is becoming more fixed into a series of static propositions and, thus, moving far from its original breaking force. Emerging from the underground scene, buto inevitably underwent several phases of institutionalization and has been, at least in part, absorbed by the system itself.

   In the 1960s, Butoh was certainly a form of resistance, but it could not resist becoming stylized and codified. How we can make a dead body stand nowadays?

   In Baudrillard’s essay Symbolic exchange and death, he criticizes the assimilation of human values into the capitalistic simulacrum and proposes using death to rupture the chain of the general exchange economy. According to him, death has zero value in the rationalistic modern, Western society. In contrast to this, Baudrillard tries to establish another economic regime inclusive of death. The question is, isn’t that the very thing Ko Murobushi is trying to do? At least he attempts to portray genuine gestures and inutile bodies that are not assimilated into the general economic regime. When he created his work titled Dead 1 in which three dancers stand upside down, he left notes commenting on the idea of Friedrich Nietzsche as follows:

Think with your head inverted. Why do dancers take the trouble to stand on their heads while dancing? It is not as if they are into asceticism to test the limits of balance. When I dance, I think like this. Usually, we dance using our feet and arms. Ordinarily, if everyone stood on their head or hands, there would be no war and no work (would we be able to have sex?); this action would mean almost a renunciation of life. In other words, one becomes momentarily “dead.” For example, Nietzsche celebrated dance in “Zarathustra,” and said, “Dance upside down”. Using useless body. However, why is dance useful? For what? Rather, dance may remain useless and ends up nothing more than remaining useless. That is my view of dance. [1]