Jean Baudrillard profile picture

Jean Baudrillard

About Me

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth-
it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
The simulacrum is true.

JEAN BAUDRILLARD
The object value system
Baudrillard's early work, in the books The System of Objects, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, and The Consumer Society, focused upon the application of structural semiotics to the thought of Karl Marx. Baudrillard argued, drawing from Roland Barthes and Georges Bataille, that, while Marxist economics and the classical economics of Adam Smith had sought to understand the consumer society in opposing ways, both unquestioningly accepted the nature of use value. Therefore, they both misunderstood need in the same way: always as a genuine, asocially-constituted drive for a given person's consumer satisfaction. Against that, Baudrillard argued that a person in buying and consuming goods and services necessarily places himself, herself within a system of signs; objects always 'say something' about their users; he developed a theory of society governed with a system of sumptuous, sacrificial consumption, in which needs become 'ideologically generated'[3]. Described as four processes for obtaining value: The functional value of an object, i.e. its instrumental purpose. (A pen writes; a refrigerator cools.) Marx's 'use-value' of an object as a commodity. The exchange value of an object, i.e. its economic value. (One pen is worth three pencils; one refrigerator is worth the salary earned for three months of work.) The symbolic value of an object, i.e. its arbitrarily-assigned and -agreed value in relation to another subject. (A pen symbolizes a student's school graduation gift or a commencement speaker's gift; a diamond as symbolic of publicly declared marital love.) The sign value of an object, its value within a system of objects. (A pen is part of a desk set, or a particular brand, type, or style of pen confers social status; a diamond ring's sign value is in relation to other diamond rings, or the absence of a diamond ring. The person is interpolated, perhaps eroded, in the seductive play of objects.) Later, Baudrillard rejected Marxism (The Mirror of Production and Symbolic Exchange and Death), but the opposition of semiotic functional logic to symbolic realm logic continued in his work until his death in 2007.
Simulacra and Simulation
As he developed his work throughout the 1980s, he moved from economically-based theory to the consideration of mediation and mass communications. Although retaining his interest in Saussurean semiotics and the logic of symbolic exchange (as influenced by anthropologist Marcel Mauss) Baudrillard turned his attention to Marshall McLuhan, developing ideas about how the nature of social relations is determined by the forms of communication that a society employs. In so doing, Baudrillard progressed beyond both Saussure's and Roland Barthes's formal semiology to consider the implications of an historically-understood (and thus formless), version of structural semiology. Most famously, he argued —in Symbolic Exchange and Death— that Western societies have undergone a "precession of simulacra".[4] This precession is in the form of "orders of simulacra", from: the era of the original to the counterfeit to the produced, mechanical copy, and through to the simulated "third order of simulacra", whereby the copy has replaced the original. Referring to "On Exactitude in Science", a fable written by Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, he argued that just as for contemporary society the simulated copy had superseded the original object, so, too, the map had come to precede the geographic territory (c.f. map and territory relation), e.g. the first Gulf War (see below): the image of war preceded real war. With such reasoning, he characterised the present age —following Ludwig Feuerbach and Guy Debord— as one of 'hyperreality' where the real object has been effaced or superseded, by the signs of its existence. Such an assertion —the one for which he is most criticised— is typical of his "fatal strategy" of attempting to push his theories of society beyond themselves. Rather than saying, that our hysteria surrounding pedophilia is such that we no longer really understand what childhood is anymore, Baudrillard argued that "the Child no longer exists".[5] Similarly, rather than arguing —as did Susan Sontag in her book On Photography— that the notion of reality has been complicated by the profusion of images of it, Baudrillard asserted: "the real no longer exists". In so saying, he characterised his philosophical challenge as no longer being the Leibnizian question of: "Why is there something, rather than nothing?", but, instead: "Why is there nothing, rather than something?"[6]
The end of history and meaning
Throughout the 1980s and '90s, one of Baudrillard's most common themes was historicity, or, more specifically, how present day societies utilise the notions of progress and modernity in their political choices. He argued, much like the political theorist Francis Fukuyama, that history had ended or 'vanished' with the spread of globalization; but, unlike Fukuyama, Baudrillard averred that this end should not be understood as the culmination of history's progress, but as the collapse of the very idea of historical progress. For Baudrillard, the end of the Cold War was not caused by one ideology's victory over the other, but the disappearance of the utopian visions that both the political Right and Left shared. Giving further evidence of his opposition toward Marxist visions of global communism and liberal visions of global civil society, Baudrillard contended that the ends they hoped for had always been illusions; indeed, as his book The Illusion of the End argued, he thought the idea of an end itself was nothing more than a misguided dream: The end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history. There are no longer any dustbins for disposing of old ideologies, old regimes, old values. Where are we going to throw Marxism, which actually invented the dustbins of history? (Yet there is some justice here since the very people who invented them have fallen in.) Conclusion: if there are no more dustbins of history, this is because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin, just as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin.[7] Within a society subject to and ruled by fast-paced electronic communication and global information networks the collapse of this facade was always going to be, he thought, inevitable. Employing a quasi-scientific vocabulary which attracted the ire of the physicist Alan Sokal, Baudrillard wrote that the speed society moved at had destabilized the linearity of history: "we have the particle accelerator that has smashed the referential orbit of things once and for all."[8] In making this argument Baudrillard found some affinity with the postmodern philosophy of Jean-Francois Lyotard, who famously argued that in the late Twentieth Century there was no longer any room for 'metanarratives.' (The triumph of a coming communism being one such metanarrative.) But, in addition to simply lamenting this collapse of history, Baudrillard also went beyond Lyotard and attempted to analyse how the idea of forward progress was being employed in spite of the notion's declining validity. Baudrillard argued that although genuine belief in a universal endpoint of history, wherein all conflicts would find their resolution, had been deemed redundant, universality was still a notion utilised in world politics as an excuse for actions. Universal values which, according to him, no-one any longer believed universal were and are still rhetorically employed to justify otherwise unjustifiable choices. The means, he wrote, are there even though the ends are no longer believed in, and are employed in order to hide the present's harsh realities (or, as he would have put it, unrealities). "In the Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization is expressed as a forward escape."[9]
On the Gulf War
Part of Baudrillard's public profile, as both an academic and a political commentator, comes from his deliberately provocative claim, in 1991, that the first Gulf War 'did not take place'. His argument (greatly criticised by Chris Norris [see below], who perceived denial of empirical events), described the Gulf War as the inverse of the Clausewitzian formula: it was not 'the continuation of politics by other means', but 'the continuation of the absence of politics by other means'. Accordingly, Saddam Hussein was not fighting the Allied Forces, but using the lives of his soldiers as a form of sacrifice to preserve his power (p. 72, 2004 edition). The Allied Forces fighting the Iraqi military forces were merely dropping 10,000 tonnes of bombs daily, as if proving to themselves that there was an enemy to fight (p. 61). So, too, were the Western media complicit, presenting the war in real time, by recycling images of war to propagate the notion that the two enemies, the US (and allies) were actually fighting the Iraqi Army, but, such was not the case: Saddam Hussein did not use his military capacity (the Iraqi Air Force), his politico-military power was not weakened (he suppressed the Kurdish insurgency against Iraq at war's end), so, concluding that politically little had changed in Iraq: the enemy went undefeated, the victors were not victorious, ergo, there was no war: the Gulf War did not occur. Much of the repute that Baudrillard found as a result of the book (originally an article form in the British newspaper The Guardian and the French newspaper Libération) was based upon the critique that the Gulf War was not ineffectual, as Baudrillard portrayed it: people died, the political map was altered, and Saddam Hussein's regime was harmed. Some critics (Norris included) accuse Baudrillard of instant revisionism; a denial of the physical occurrence of the conflict (part of his denial of reality, in general). Consequently, Baudrillard was accused of lazy amoralism, encompassing cynical scepticism, and Berkelian idealism. Sympathetic commentators (such as William Merrin, in his book Baudrillard and the Media) have argued that Baudrillard was more concerned with the West's technological and political dominance and the globalization of its commercial interests, and what it means for the present possibility of war. Merrin has averred that Baudrillard did not deny that something occurred, but merely denied that that something was a war; rather it was 'an atrocity masquerading as a war'. Merrin's book viewed the accusations of amorality as redundant and based upon misreading; Baudrillard's own position was more nuanced. To put it in Baudrillard's own words (p. 71-72): Saddam liquidates the communists, Moscow flirts even more with him; he gases the Kurds, it is not held against him; he eliminates the religious cadres, the whole of Islam makes peace with him.... Even ... the 100,000 dead will only have been the final decoy that Saddam will have sacrificed, the blood money paid in forfeit according to a calculated equivalence, in order to conserve his power. What is worse is that these dead still serve as an alibi for those who do not want to have been excited for nothing: at least these dead will prove this war was indeed a war and not a shameful and pointless hoax....
On the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks
In contrast to the 'non-event' of the Gulf War, in the essay The Spirit of Terrorism he characterised the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City as the 'absolute event.' Seeking to understand them as an (ab)reaction to the technological and political expansion of capitalist globalization, rather than as a war of religiously-based or civilization-based warfare. He termed the absolute event, and its consequences, as follows (p. 11 in the 2002 version): This is not a clash of civilisations or religions, and it reaches far beyond Islam and America, on which efforts are being made to focus the conflict in order to create the delusion of a visible confrontation and a solution based upon force. There is indeed a fundamental antagonism here, but one that points past the spectre of America (which is perhaps the epicentre, but in no sense the sole embodiment, of globalisation) and the spectre of Islam (which is not the embodiment of terrorism either) to triumphant globalisation battling against itself. Baudrillard thus placed the attacks —as befits his theory of society— in context as a symbolic reaction to the continued expansion of a world based solely upon commodity exchange. This stance was criticised on two counts. First, authors disagreed on whether the attacks were deserved. Richard Wolin (in The Seduction of Unreason) forcefully accused Baudrillard and Slavoj Zizek, of all but celebrating the terrorist attacks, essentially claiming that the United States of America received what it deserved. Zizek, however, countered that accusation to Wolin's analysis as a form of intellectual barbarism in the journal Critical Inquiry, saying that Wolin fails to see the difference between fantasising about an event and stating that one is deserving of that event. Merrin (in Baudrillard and the Media) argued that Baudrillard's position affords the terrorists a type of moral superiority. In the journal Economy and Society, Merrin further noted that Baudrillard gives the symbolic facets of society unfair privilege above semiotic concerns. Second, authors questioned whether the attacks were unavoidable. Bruno Latour, in Critical Inquiry argued that Baudrillard believed that their destruction was forced by the society that created them, alluding the Towers were 'brought down by their own weight'. In Latour's view, this was because Baudrillard conceived only of society in terms of a symbolic and semiotic dualism.

My Interests

Jean Baudrillard - social theorist best known for his analyses of modes of mediation and of technological communication; the scope of his writing covers diverse subjects —from consumerism to gender relations to the social understanding of history to journalistic commentaries about AIDS, cloning, the Rushdie affair, the (first) Gulf War and the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, USA. He had affinities with post-structuralism; his arguments consistently drew upon the notion that systems of signification and meaning are understandable only in terms of their interrelation. In contrast to Foucault, however, of whom he was sharply critical, Baudrillard developed theories based not on power and knowledge but on the notions of seduction, simulation, and the word most associated with his philosophy, hyperreality. These notions share the common principle that signification, and therefore meaning, is self-referential (i.e. construed upon absence, following structuralist semiotics— so, 'dog' means 'dog' not because of what the word says so, but because of what it does not say: 'cat', 'goat', 'tree' et cetera). This principle argues that in contemporary global society, wherein technological communication has created an excessive proliferation of meaning, the self-referentiality of meaning has prompted, not a McLuhan-style global village, but a world where meaning has been effaced, reducing society to an opaque mass, where the real has been reduced to self-referential signs of its existence. In this postulate, the erosion of meaning via its excess, Baudrillard —against Foucault, Kantian rationalism, and liberal humanism— sought to understand the world neither in terms of the subject's desire to coherently know the world, nor in terms of the interpolation of power within subjectivity (in the manner of Foucault), but in terms of the object, and its power to seduce (its power to stand for, or to simulate). As a result Baudrillard had, particularly in his later work, 'withdrawn' himself, in a sense, from his own writing, by employing poetic and ironic language in his books. His political stance led him —drawing upon the anthropological work of Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille— to oppose semiotic logic —meaning, sign, signification, and commodity exchange— in favor of the symbolic realm —gift exchange, potlatch (the practice of sumptuous destruction), and analyses of the principle of Evil (and the meaning of invoking said principle). This prompted him to characterize the world in terms of the binary opposition of symbolic cultures (based upon gift exchange) and the expanding 'globalized' world (based upon sign and commodity exchange), a world which has no answer to symbolic logic. Hence, In his last years, Baudrillard portentously held that the expansion of liberal, parliamentary capitalism and its financial commodification unwittingly sows the seeds of reaction against it by its failure to understand the symbolic side of social existence. Indeed, he (controversially) argued that this is the best framework to understand the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the economy of the United States and its military establishment. (see below).

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