Nor does Baudrillard develop a theory of class or group revolt, or any theory of political organization, struggle, or strategy of the sort frequent in posts France. Following the general line of critical Marxism, Baudrillard argues that the process of social homogenization, alienation, and exploitation constitutes a process of reification in commodities, technologies, and things i.
Conditions of labor imposed submission and standardization on human life, as well as exploiting workers and alienating them from a life of freedom and self-determination.
In a media and consumer society, culture and consumption also became homogenized, depriving individuals of the possibility of cultivating individuality and self-determination.
Baudrillard goes beyond the Frankfurt School by applying the semiological theory of the sign to describe how commodities, media, and technologies provide a universe of illusion and fantasy in which individuals become overpowered by consumer values, media ideologies and role models, and seductive technologies like computers which provide worlds of cyberspace. Yet this active manipulation of signs is not equivalent to postulating an active human subject that could resist, redefine, or produce its own signs, thus Baudrillard fails to develop a genuine theory of agency.
But in his provocation, The Mirror of Production translated into English in , Baudrillard carries out a systematic attack on classical Marxism, claiming that Marxism is but a mirror of bourgeois society, placing production at the center of life, thus naturalizing the capitalist organization of society. Although in the s, Baudrillard participated in the tumultuous events of May , and was associated with the revolutionary Left and Marxism, he broke with Marxism in the early s, but remained politically radical though unaffiliated the rest of the decade.
Consequently, Baudrillard began a radical critique of Marxism, one that would be repeated by many of his contemporaries who would also take a postmodern turn see Best and Kellner and Baudrillard argues that Marxism, first, does not adequately illuminate premodern societies that were organized around religion, mythology, and tribal organization and not production.
He also argues that Marxism does not provide a sufficiently radical critique of capitalist societies and alternative critical discourses and perspectives. At this stage, Baudrillard turns to anthropological perspectives on premodern societies for hints of more emancipatory alternatives.
Yet it is important to note that this critique of Marxism was taken from the Left, arguing that Marxism did not provide a radical enough critique of, or alternative to, contemporary capitalist and communist societies organized around production.
Baudrillard concluded that French communist failure to support the May 68 movements was rooted in part in a conservatism that had roots in Marxism itself.
Hence, Baudrillard and others of his generation began searching for alternative critical positions. The Mirror of Production and his next book Symbolic Exchange and Death , a major text finally translated in , are attempts to provide ultraradical perspectives that overcome the limitations of an economistic Marxist tradition that privileges the economic sphere.
The text opens with a Preface that condenses his attempt to provide a significantly different approach to society and culture. He argued that if individuals wanted to be truly sovereign e. For Bataille, human beings were beings of excess with exorbitant energy, fantasies, drives, needs, and heterogeneous desire.
Bataille and Baudrillard presuppose here a contradiction between human nature and capitalism. Bataille, to the contrary, sweeps away all this slave dialectic from an aristocratic point of view, that of the master struggling with his death.
One can accuse this perspective of being pre- or post-Marxist. At any rate, Marxism is only the disenchanted horizon of capital — all that precedes or follows it is more radical than it is Nietzschean categories like fate, reversal, uncertainty, and an aristocratic assault on conventional wisdom began to shape his writings, that often, a la Nietzsche, took the form of aphorisms or short essays.
The dark side of his switch in theoretical and political allegiances is a valorization of i. On the whole, in his mids work, Baudrillard was extricating himself from the familiar Marxian universe of production and class struggle into a quite different neo-aristocratic and metaphysical world-view.
Developing these ideas, Baudrillard sketched a fundamental dividing line in history between symbolic societies — i. He thus rejects the Marxian philosophy of history which posits the primacy of production in all societies and rejects the Marxian concept of socialism, arguing that it does not break radically enough with capitalist productivism, offering itself merely as a more efficient and equitable organization of production rather than as a completely different sort of society with a different values and forms of culture and life.
Henceforth, Baudrillard would contrast — in one way or another — his ideal of symbolic exchange to the values of production, utility, and instrumental rationality that govern capitalist and socialist societies. This is the metabolism of exchange, prodigality, festival — and also of destruction which returns to non-value what production has erected, valorized.
Thus, against the organizing forms of modern thought and society, Baudrillard champions symbolic exchange as an alternative. In all of these instances, there is a rupture with the forms of exchange of goods, meanings, and libidinal energies and thus an escape from the forms of production, capitalism, rationality, and meaning.
Against modern values, he advocates their annihilation and extermination. In s like Baudrillard posits another divide in history as radical as the rupture between premodern symbolic societies and modern ones. Following Marx, he argues that this modern epoch was the era of capitalism and the bourgeoisie, in which workers were exploited by capital and provided a revolutionary force of upheaval.
Baudrillard, however, declared the end of political economy and thus the end of the Marxist problematic and of modernity itself:. The end of labor. The end of production. The end of political economy. The end of linear dimension of discourse. The end of the linear dimension of the commodity.
The end of the classical era of the sign. The end of the era of production Baudrillard a: 8. People are now, Baudrillard claims, in a new era of simulation in which social reproduction information processing, communication, and knowledge industries, and so on replaces production as the organizing form of society.
Henceforth, signs and codes proliferate and produce other signs and new sign machines in ever-expanding and spiraling cycles. Technology thus replaces capital in this story and semiurgy interpreted by Baudrillard as proliferation of images, information, and signs replaces production. His postmodern turn is thus connected to a form of technological determinism and a rejection of political economy as a useful explanatory principle — a move that many of his critics reject see Kellner , Norris , and the studies in Kellner For him, modern societies are organized around the production and consumption of commodities, while postmodern societies are organized around simulation and the play of images and signs, denoting a situation in which codes, models, and signs are the organizing forms of a new social order where simulation rules.
Economics, politics, social life, and culture are all governed by the mode of simulation, whereby codes and models determine how goods are consumed and used, politics unfold, culture is produced and consumed, and everyday life is lived. In his society of simulation, the realms of economics, politics, culture, sexuality, and the social all implode into each other. In this implosive mix, economics is fundamentally shaped by culture, politics, and other spheres, while art, once a sphere of potential difference and opposition, is absorbed into the economic and political, while sexuality is everywhere.
In this situation, differences between individuals and groups implode in a rapidly mutating or changing dissolution of the social and the previous boundaries and structures upon which social theory had once focused. In addition, his postmodern universe is one of hyperreality in which entertainment, information, and communication technologies provide experiences more intense and involving than the scenes of banal everyday life, as well as the codes and models that structure everyday life.
The realm of the hyperreal e. In this universe, subjectivities are fragmented and lost, and a new terrain of experience appears that for Baudrillard renders previous social theories and politics obsolete and irrelevant. Tracing the vicissitudes of the subject in present-day society, Baudrillard claims that contemporary subjects are no longer afflicted with modern pathologies like hysteria or paranoia.
In other words, an individual in a postmodern world becomes merely an entity influenced by media, technological experience, and the hyperreal. His style and writing strategies are also implosive i. His writing attempts to itself simulate the new conditions, capturing its novelties through inventive use of language and theory. Such radical questioning of contemporary theory and the need for new theoretical strategies are thus legitimated for Baudrillard by the large extent of changes in the current era.
For instance, Baudrillard claims that modernity operates with a mode of representation in which ideas represent reality and truth, concepts that are key postulates of modern theory.
A postmodern society explodes this epistemology by creating a situation in which subjects lose contact with the real and fragment and dissolve.
This situation portends the end of modern theory that operated with a subject-object dialectic in which the subject was supposed to represent and control the object. In the story of modern philosophy, the philosophic subject attempts to discern the nature of reality, to secure grounded knowledge, and to apply this knowledge to control and dominate the object e.
In this alarming and novel postmodern situation, the referent, the behind and the outside, along with depth, essence, and reality all disappear, and with their disappearance, the possibility of all potential opposition vanishes as well. As simulations proliferate, they come to refer only to themselves: a carnival of mirrors reflecting images projected from other mirrors onto the omnipresent television and computer screen and the screen of consciousness, which in turn refers the image to its previous storehouse of images also produced by simulatory mirrors.
Baudrillard claims that henceforth the masses seek spectacle and not meaning. Fixed distinctions between social groupings and ideologies implode and concrete face-to-face social relations recede as individuals disappear in worlds of simulation — media, computers, virtual reality itself. Social theory itself thus loses its object, the social, while radical politics loses its subject and agency. Nonetheless, he claims, at this point in his trajectory i.
Hovering between nostalgia and nihilism, Baudrillard at once exterminates modern ideas e. This desperate search for a genuinely revolutionary alternative was abandoned, however, by the early s.
Henceforth, he develops yet more novel perspectives on the contemporary moment, vacillating between sketching out alternative modes of thought and behavior and renouncing the quest for political and social change. In a sense, there is a parodic inversion of historical materialism in Baudrillard. Turning the Marxist categories against themselves, masses absorb classes, the subject of praxis is fractured, and objects come to rule human beings.
Revolution is absorbed by the object of critique and technological implosion replaces the socialist revolution in producing a rupture in history. For Baudrillard, in contrast to Marx, the catastrophe of modernity and eruption of postmodernity is produced by the unfolding of technological revolution. During the s, his major works of the s were translated into many languages and new books of the s were in turn translated into English and other major languages in short order.
Consequently, he became world-renown as one of the most influential thinkers of postmodernity. Baudrillard became something of an academic celebrity, travelling around the world promoting his work and winning a significant following, though more outside of the field of academic theory than within his own discipline of sociology.
In , he published Seduction , a difficult text that represented a major shift in his thought. The book marks a turning away from the more sociological discourse of his earlier works to a more philosophical and literary discourse. Whereas in Symbolic Exchange and Death a [] , Baudrillard sketched out ultra-revolutionary perspectives as a radical alternative, taking symbolic exchange as his ideal, he now takes seduction as his alternative to production and communicative interaction.
Seduction, however, does not undermine, subvert, or transform existing social relations or institutions, but is a soft alternative, a play with appearances, and a game with feminism, a provocation that provoked a sharp critical response. He interprets seduction primarily as a ritual and game with its own rules, charms, snares, and lures. His scenario concerns the proliferation and growing supremacy of objects over subjects and the eventual triumph of the object.
Ecstasy is thus the form of obscenity fully explicit, nothing hidden and of the hyperreality described by Baudrillard earlier taken to another level, redoubled and intensified. His vision of contemporary society exhibits a careening of growth and excrescence croissance et excroissance , expanding and excreting ever more goods, services, information, messages or demands — surpassing all rational ends and boundaries in a spiral of uncontrolled growth and replication.
In this imaginary world the only phantasmagoria is in the inherent warmth and affection of the crowd, and in that sufficiently excessive number of gadgets used there specifically to maintain the multitudinous affect. The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot—a veritable concentration camp—is total…. Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America, which is Disneyland… Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and simulation.
Go and organize a fake holdup. Be sure to check that your weapons are harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no life is in danger otherwise you risk committing an offense. Demand ransom, and arrange it so that the operation creates the greatest commotion possible—in brief, stay close to the "truth," so as to test the reaction of the apparatus to a perfect simulation.
But you won't succeed : the web of artificial signs will be inextricably mixed up with real elements a police officer will really shoot on sight; a bank customer will faint and die of a heart attack; they will really turn the phony ransom over to you — in brief, you will unwittingly find yourself immediately in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to devour every attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to some reality—that's exactly how the established order is, well before institutions and justice come into play….
Thus all holdups, hijacks, and the like are now as it were simulation holdups, in the sense that they are inscribed in advance in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the media, anticipated in their mode of presentation and possible consequences. In brief, where they function as a set of signs dedicated exclusively to their recurrence as signs, and no longer to their "real" goal at all.
Right at the very heart of news, history threatens to disappear. At the heart of hi-fi, music threatens to disappear. At the heart of experimentation, the object of science threatens to disappear. At the heart of pornography, sexuality threatens to disappear. Everywhere we find the same stereophonic effect, the same effect of absolute proximity to the real, the same effect of simulation. By definition, this vanishing point, this point short of which history existed and music existed , cannot be pinned down.
Where must stereo perfection end? The boundaries are constantly being pushed back because it is technical obsession which redraws them.
Where must news reporting end? One can only counter this fascination with 'real time'—the equivalent of high fidelity—with a moral objection, and there is not much point in that. A gift e. The gift still exists — albeit in a reduced form — in capitalist societies; it is the obstacle to any easy theory of the economy as equilibrium.
But even if one were to accept the division between objects of usevalue objects of utility and needs , and objects of exchange-value, the question arises as to where precisely the line is to be drawn between these two forms. In his books which address this issue — Le Systeme des objets , Consumer Society , For a Political Economy of the Sign — Baudrillard first broadens the scope of the analysis by adding the symbolic object and the sign object to the category of the object.
He then argues that it is necessary to distinguish four different logics: 1 The logic of practical operations, which corresponds to use-value; 2 The logic of equivalence, which corresponds to exchange-value; 3 The logic of ambivalence, which corresponds to symbolic exchange; and 4 the logic of difference, which corresponds to sign-value. These logics may be summarised, respectively, as those of utility, the market, the gift and status.
In the logic of the first category, the object becomes an instrument, in the second, a commodity, in the third, a symbol, and in the fourth, a sign Baudrillard a: With his semiotic writings on the object, Baudrillard, now following Saussure and the structuralists, endeavours to show that no object exists in isolation from others.
Instead their differential, or relational, aspect becomes crucial in understanding them. In addition, while there is a utilitarian aspect to many objects, what is essential to them is their capacity to signify a status. To be emphasised here, is that objects are not simply consumed in a consumer society; they are produced less to satisfy a need than to signify a status, and this is only possible because of the differential relationship between objects.
Hence, in a thorough-going consumer society, objects become signs, and the realm of necessity is left far behind — if it ever really existed. Needs, he suggests, can only be sustained by an ideologically based anthropology of the subject. Often this takes a psychologistic needs as a function of human nature , or a culturalist form needs as a function of society.
Once the work of Veblen on conspicuous consumption , Bataille and Mauss is considered, and different social and cultural formations are brought into the equation, the notion that irreducible primary needs govern human activities becomes a myth.
In sum, human beings do not search for happiness; they do not search to realise equality; consumption does not homogenise it — differentiates through the sign system. Life-style and values — not economic need — is the basis of social life.
What must be avoided, says Baudrillard, is a critique of consumerism and the notion of homo economicus at the cost of a renewed moralism. In elaborating on this, Baudrillard sets out an idea at the end of his analysis of consumer society which will serve as a touch stone for all of his subsequent work. It is that in the discourse of consumption, there is an anti-discourse: the exalted discourse of abundance is everywhere duplicated by a critique of consumer society — even to the point where advertising often intentionally parodies advertising.
The society of consumption is also the society of the denunciation of consumption. Not that Baudrillard unlike Eco spends much time in defining the nature and subtleties of the notion of code. Indeed, we can note in passing that he rarely defines his key terms in anything like an exhaustive fashion, the sense largely being derived from the context, and from the view that Baudrillard accepts the developments in semiotics and other fields as given.
The era of the code in fact supersedes the era of the sign. None of this is spelled out, but is clearly implied by the context. The code entails that the object produced — tissue in biology, for example — is not a copy in the accepted sense of the term, where the copy is the copy of an original, natural object. Rather, the difference between copy and original is now redundant. How redundant? This is a key question. Baudrillard tends to say entirely redundant; but this is also in keeping with his belief that the only way to keep the social system from imploding is to take up an extreme theoretical position.
Many would argue, however, that the code has not yet, and will not, assume the hegemonic proportions Baudrillard sketches out. That the code is of extreme importance, however, cannot be denied. Virtual reality, global communications, the hologram and art are just some of the areas in addition to those enumerated above where it is exemplified.
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