## 1. Early Writings: From the *System of Objects* to *The Mirror of Production*




Jean Baudrillard was born in the cathedral town of Reims, France in
1929. He told interviewers that his grandparents were peasants and his
parents became civil servants (Gane 1993: 19). Baudrillard also claims
that he was the first member of his family to pursue an advanced
education and that this led to a rupture with his parents and cultural
milieu. In 1956, he began working as a professor of secondary education
in a French high school (Lycee) and in the early 1960s did
editorial work for the French publisher Seuil. Baudrillard was
initially a Germanist who published essays on literature in *Les
temps modernes* in 1962-1963 and translated works of Peter Weiss
and Bertolt Brecht into French, as well as a book on messianic
revolutionary movements by Wilhelm Muhlmann. During this period,
he met and studied the works of Henri Lefebvre, whose critiques of
everyday life impressed him, and Roland Barthes, whose semiological
analyses of contemporary society had lasting influence on his work.




In 1966, Baudrillard entered the University of Paris, Nanterre, and
became Lefebvre's assistant, while studying languages,
philosophy, sociology, and other disciplines. He defended his
"These de Troisieme Cycle" in sociology at Nanterre
in 1966 with a dissertation on "Le systeme des
objects," and began teaching sociology in October of that year.
Opposing French and U.S. intervention in the Algerian and Vietnamese
wars, Baudrillard associated himself with the French Left in the 1960s.
Nanterre was a key site of radical politics and the "March 22
movement," associated with Daniel Cohn-Bendit and the
*enrages*, began in the Nanterre sociology department.
Baudrillard said later that he participated in the events of May 1968
that resulted in massive student uprisings and a general strike that
almost drove de Gaulle from power.




During the late 1960s, Baudrillard published a series of books that
would eventually make him world famous. Influenced by Lefebvre,
Barthes, and a series of French thinkers whose influence will be
discussed below, Baudrillard undertook serious work in the field of
social theory, semiology, and psychoanalysis in the 1960s and published
his first book *The System of Objects* in 1968 (1996), followed
by a book on *The Consumer Society* in 1970 (1998), and *For
a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign* in
1972
 (1981).[2]
These early
publications are attempts, within the framework of critical sociology,
to combine the studies of everyday life initiated by Lefebvre (1971 and
1991 [1947]) with a social semiology that studies the life of signs in
social life. This project, influenced by Barthes (1967 [1964], 1972
[1958], and 1983 [1967]), centers on the system of objects in the
consumer society (the focus of his first two books), and the interface
between political economy and semiotics (the nucleus of his
third
 book).[3]
Baudrillard's
early work was one of the first to appropriate semiology to analyze how
objects are encoded with a system of signs and meanings that constitute
contemporary media and consumer societies. Combining semiological
studies, Marxian political economy, and sociology of the consumer
society, Baudrillard began his life-long task of exploring the system
of objects and signs which forms our everyday life.




The early Baudrillard described the meanings invested in the objects
of everyday life (e.g., the power accrued through identification with
one's automobile when driving) and the structural system through
which objects were organized into a new modern society (e.g., the
prestige or *sign-value* of a new sports car). In his first
three books, Baudrillard maintained that the classical Marxian critique
of political economy needed to be supplemented by semiological theories
of the sign which articulated the diverse meanings signified by
signifiers into languages organized into systems of meaning.
Baudrillard, following Barthes and others, argued that fashion, sports,
the media, and other modes of signification produced systems of meaning
articulated by specific rules, codes, and logics (terms used somewhat
interchangeably by Baudrillard which are elucidated in more detail
below).




Situating his analysis of signs, language, and everyday life in a
historical framework, Baudrillard argued that the transition from the
earlier stage of competitive market capitalism to the stage of monopoly
capitalism required increased attention to demand management, to
augmenting and steering consumption. At this historical stage, from
around 1920 to the 1960s, the need to intensify demand supplemented
concern with lowering production costs and with expanding production.
In this era of capitalist development, economic concentration, new
production techniques, and the development of new technologies,
accelerated capacity for mass production and capitalist corporations
focused increased attention on managing consumption and creating needs
for new prestigious goods, thus producing the regime of what
Baudrillard has called *sign-value*.




On Baudrillard's analysis, advertising, packaging, display,
fashion, "emancipated" sexuality, mass media and culture,
and the proliferation of commodities multiplied the quantity of signs
and spectacles, and produced a proliferation of sign-value. Henceforth,
Baudrillard claims, commodities are not merely to be characterized by
use-value and exchange value, as in Marx's theory of the
commodity, but sign-value -- the expression and mark of style,
prestige, luxury, power, and so on -- becomes an increasingly
important part of the commodity and consumption (see Goldman and Papson
1996).




From this perspective, Baudrillard claims that commodities are
bought and displayed as much for their sign-value as their use-value,
and that the phenomenon of sign-value has become an essential
constituent of the commodity and consumption in the consumer society.
This position was influenced by Veblen's notion of
"conspicuous consumption" and display of commodities
analyzed in his *Theory of the Leisure Class* that Baudrillard
argued has become extended to everyone in the consumer society. For
Baudrillard, the entire society is organized around consumption and
display of commodities through which individuals gain prestige,
identity, and standing. In this system, the more prestigious
one's commodities (houses, cars, clothes, and so on), the higher
one's standing in the realm of sign value. Thus, just as words
take on meaning according to their position in a differential system of
language, so sign values take on meaning according to their place in a
differential system of prestige and status.




In *The Consumer Society*, Baudrillard concludes by extolling
"multiple forms of refusal" of social convention,
conspicuous consumption, and conformist thought and behavior, all of
which can be fused in a "practice of radical change" (1998:
183). He alludes here to the expectation of "violent eruptions
and sudden disintegration which will come, just as unforeseeably and as
certainly May 68, to wreck this white mass" [of consumption]
(1998: 196). On the other hand, Baudrillard also describes a situation
where alienation is so total that it cannot be surpassed because
"it is the very structure of market society" (1998: 190).
His argument is that in a society where everything is a commodity that
can be bought and sold, alienation is total. Indeed, the term
"alienation" originally signified "to sale,"
and in a totally commodified society, alienation is ubiquitous.
Moreover, Baudrillard posits "the end of transcendence" (a
phrase borrowed from Marcuse) where individuals can neither perceive
their own true needs or another way of life (1998: 190ff).



*Baudrillard and Neo-Marxism*




By 1970, Baudrillard has distinguished himself from the Marxist
theory of revolution and instead postulates only the possibility of
revolt against the consumer society in an "unforeseeable but
certain" form. In the late 1960s, he had associated himself with
a group of intellectuals around the journal *Utopie* which
sought to overcome disciplinary boundaries and in the spirit of Guy
Debord and the Situationist International to combine reflections on
alternative societies, architecture, and modes of
everyday
 life.[4]
Bringing together
individuals on the margins of architecture, city planning, cultural
criticism and social theory, Baudrillard and his associates
distinguished themselves from other political and theoretical groupings
and developed idiosyncratic and marginal discourse beyond the
boundaries of established disciplines and political tendencies. This
affiliation with *Utopie* only lasted into the early 1970s, but
it may have helped produce in him a desire to work on the margins, to
stand aside from current trends and fads, and to develop his own
theoretical positions. His articles from this project have been
collected in English translation in *Utopia Deferred*
(2006a).




Baudrillard thus had an ambivalent relation to classical Marxism by
the early 1970s. On one hand, he carried forward the Marxian critique
of commodity production which delineates and criticizes various forms
of alienation, domination, and exploitation produced by capitalism. At
this stage, it appeared that his critique takes place from the standard
neo-Marxian vantage point which assumes that capitalism is blameworthy
because it is homogenizing, controlling and dominating social life,
while robbing individuals of their freedom, creativity, time and human
potentialities. On the other hand, he cannot point to any revolutionary
forces and in particular did not discuss the situation and potential of
the working class as an agent of change in the consumer society.
Indeed, Baudrillard has no theory of the subject as an active agent of
social change whatsoever, thus following the structuralist and
poststructuralist critique of the philosophical and practical subject
categorized by Descartes, Kant, and Sartre which was long dominant in
French thought. Structuralists and poststructuralists argued that
subjectivity was produced by language, social institutions, and
cultural forms and was not independent of its construction in these
institutions and practices.




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 post-1960s France. Yet Baudrillard's work here is
particularly close to the work of the Frankfurt school, especially that
of Herbert Marcuse, who had already developed some of the first Marxist
critiques of the consumer society (see Kellner 1984 and 1989b). Like
Lukacs (1971) and the Frankfurt School, Baudrillard analyzes how
the commodity and commodification permeate social life and come to
dominate individual thought and behavior. 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.e.,
"objects") come to dominate people ("subjects")
divesting them of their human qualities and capacities.




For Lukacs, the Frankfurt School, and Baudrillard,
*reification* -- the process whereby human beings become
dominated by things and become more thinglike themselves -- comes
to govern social life. 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.




In a sense, Baudrillard's work can be read as an account of a
further stage of reification and social domination than that described
by the Frankfurt School who described how individuals were controlled
by ruling institutions and modes of thought. 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.
Eventually, he will take his analysis of domination by signs and the
system of objects to even more pessimistic conclusions where he
concludes that the thematic of the "end of the individual"
sketched by the Frankfurt School has reached its fruition in the total
defeat of human subjectivity by the object world (see
 Section 3).




Yet in some writings, Baudrillard has a somewhat more active theory
of consumption than that of the Frankfurt School's that generally
portrays consumption as a passive mode of social integration. By
contrast, consumption in Baudrillard's early writings is itself a
kind of labor, "an active manipulation of signs," a way of
inserting oneself within the consumer society, and working to
differentiate oneself from others. 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.




Baudrillard's first three works can thus be read in the
framework of a neo-Marxian critique of capitalist societies. One could
read Baudrillard's emphasis on consumption as a supplement to
Marx's analysis of production and his focus on culture and signs
as an important supplement to classical Marxian political economy,
which adds a cultural and semiological dimension to the Marxian
project. But in his 1973 provocation, *The Mirror of Production*
(translated into English in 1975), 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 1960s, Baudrillard participated in the tumultuous
events of May 1968, and was associated with the revolutionary Left and
Marxism, he broke with Marxism in the early 1970s, but remained
politically radical though unaffiliated the rest of the decade. Like
many on the Left, Baudrillard was disappointed that the French
Communist Party did not support the radical '60s movements and he
also distrusted the official Marxism of theorists like Louis Althusser
who he found dogmatic and reductive. 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 1991 and 1997).




Baudrillard (1975) 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.


## 2. Symbolic Exchange and the Postmodern Break



*The Mirror of Production* and his next book *Symbolic
Exchange and Death* (1976), a major text finally translated in
1993, are attempts to provide ultraradical perspectives that overcome
the limitations of an economistic Marxist tradition that privileges the
economic sphere. This ultra-leftist phase of Baudrillard's
itinerary would be short-lived, however, though in *Symbolic
Exchange and Death*, Baudrillard produces one of his most important
and dramatic provocations. The text opens with a Preface that condenses
his attempt to provide a significantly different approach to society
and culture. Building on the French cultural theory of Georges
Bataille, Marcel Mauss, and Alfred Jarry, he champions "symbolic
exchange" which resists capitalist values of utility and monetary
profit for cultural values. Baudrillard argues that in Bataille's
claim that expenditure and excess is connected with sovereignty,
Mauss's descriptions of the social prestige of gift-giving in
premodern society, Jarry's theater that ridicules French culture,
and Saussure's anagrams, there is a break with the values of
capitalist exchange and production, or the production of meaning in
linguistic exchange. These cases of "symbolic exchange,"
Baudrillard believes, break with the values of production and describe
poetic exchange and creative cultural activity that provides
alternatives to the capitalist values of production and exchange.




The term "symbolic exchange" was derived from Georges
Bataille's notion of a "general economy" where
expenditure, waste, sacrifice, and destruction were claimed to be more
fundamental to human life than economies of production and utility
(1988 [1967]). Bataille's model was the sun that freely expended
its energy without asking anything in return. He argued that if
individuals wanted to be truly sovereign (e.g., free from the
imperatives of capitalism) they should pursue a "general
economy" of expenditure, giving, sacrifice, and destruction to
escape determination by existing imperatives of utility.




For Bataille, human beings were beings of *excess* with
exorbitant energy, fantasies, drives, needs, and heterogeneous desire.
At this point, Baudrillard presupposes the truth of Bataille's
anthropology and general economy. In a 1976 review of a volume of
Bataille's *Complete Works*, Baudrillard writes:
"The central idea is that the economy which governs our societies
results from a misappropriation of the fundamental human principle,
which is a solar principle of expenditure" (1987: 57). In the
early 1970s, Baudrillard took over Bataille's anthropological
position and what he calls Bataille's "aristocratic
critique" of capitalism that he now claims is grounded in the
crass notions of utility and savings rather than the more sublime
"aristocratic" notion of excess and expenditure. Bataille
and Baudrillard presuppose here a contradiction between human nature
and capitalism. They maintain that humans "by nature" gain
pleasure from such things as expenditure, waste, festivities,
sacrifices, and so on, in which they are sovereign and free to expend
the excesses of their energy (and thus to follow their "real
nature"). The capitalist imperatives of labor, utility, and
savings by implication are "unnatural," and go against
human nature.




Baudrillard argues that the Marxian critique of capitalism, by
contrast, merely attacks exchange value while exalting use value and
thus utility and instrumental rationality, thereby "seeking a
*good use* of the economy." For Baudrillard:



> 
> 
> 
> Marxism is therefore only a limited petit bourgeois critique, one
> more step in the banalization of life toward the 'good use'
> of the social! 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 (1987: 60).
> 
> 
> 




This passage is highly revealing and marks Baudrillard's
switch to an "aristocratic critique" of political economy
deeply influenced by Bataille and Nietzsche. For Bataille and
Baudrillard are presenting a version of Nietzsche's aristocratic
"master morality" where "superior" individuals
create their own values and their life articulates an excess, overflow,
and intensification of creative and erotic energies. Nietzsche was a
major
 influence[5]
throughout
Baudrillard's life and, especially in the last decades of his
work, Nietzschean motifs, modes of thought, and writing practices
increasingly informed his work. Baudrillard became increasingly radical
and "un-contemporary," standing alone against current
trends and fashions, in a fiercely individualistic mode of thought.
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.




For some time, Baudrillard would continue to attack the bourgeoisie,
capital, and political economy, but from a perspective which champions
"aristocratic" expenditure and sumptuary, aesthetic and
symbolic values. The dark side of his switch in theoretical and
political allegiances is a *valorization* of (i.e., a giving or
assigning of value to) sacrifice and death that informs *Symbolic
Exchange and Death* (in which sacrifice provides a giving that
subverts bourgeois values of utility and self-preservation, an idea
that has sinister implications in an era of suicide bombings and
terrorism).




On the whole, in his mid-1970s 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. Baudrillard seems to assume at this point that
pre-capitalist societies were governed by forms of symbolic exchange
similar to Bataille's notion of a general economy. Influenced by
Mauss' theory of the gift and countergift, Baudrillard claimed
that pre-capitalist societies were governed by laws of symbolic
exchange rather than production and utility. Developing these ideas,
Baudrillard sketched a fundamental dividing line in history between
symbolic societies -- i.e., societies fundamentally organized
around premodern exchange -- and productivist societies (i.e.,
societies organized around production and commodity exchange). 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. "Symbolic exchange" thus emerges as
Baudrillard's "revolutionary" alternative to the
values and practices of capitalist society, and stands for a variety of
heterogeneous activities in his 1970s writings. For instance, he writes
in the *Critique*: "The exchange of looks, the present
which comes and goes, are like the air people breathe in and out. This
is the metabolism of exchange, prodigality, festival -- and also
of destruction (which returns to non-value what production has erected,
valorized). In this domain, value isn't even recognized"
(1981: 207). He also describes his conception of symbolic exchange in
*The Mirror of Production* where he writes: "The symbolic
social relation is the uninterrupted cycle of giving and receiving,
which, in primitive exchange, includes the consumption of the
'surplus' and deliberate anti-production" (1975:
143). The term therefore refers to symbolic or cultural activities
which do not contribute to capitalist production and accumulation and
which potentially constitute a "radical negation" of
productivist society.




At this stage of his thought, Baudrillard stood in a French
tradition of extolling "primitive" or premodern culture
over the abstract rationalism and utilitarianism of modern society. His
defense of symbolic exchange over production and instrumental
rationality thus stands in the tradition of Rousseau's defense of
the "natural savage" over modern man, Durkheim's
posing mechanical solidarities of premodern societies against the
abstract individualism and anomie of modern ones, Bataille's
valorization of expenditure of premodern societies, or Mauss' or
Levi-Strauss' fascination with the richness of "primitive
societies" or "the savage mind." After deconstructing
the modern master thinkers and his own theoretical fathers (Marx,
Freud, Saussure, and his French contemporaries) for missing the
richness of symbolic exchange, Baudrillard continues to champion the
symbolic and radical forms of thought and writing in a quest that takes
him into ever more esoteric and exotic discourse.




Thus, against the organizing forms of modern thought and society,
Baudrillard champions symbolic exchange as an alternative. Against
modern demands to produce value and meaning, he calls for their
extermination and annihilation, providing as examples, Mauss's
gift-exchange, Saussure's anagrams, and Freud's concept of
the death drive. 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. Baudrillard's paradoxical concept of symbolic exchange
can be explained as expression of a desire to liberate himself from
modern positions and to seek a revolutionary position outside of modern
society. Against modern values, he advocates their annihilation and
extermination.




In 1970s like Baudrillard posits another divide in history as
radical as the rupture between premodern symbolic societies and modern
ones. In the mode of classical social theory, he systematically
develops distinctions between premodern societies organized around
symbolic exchange, modern societies organized around production, and
postmodern societies organized around "simulation" by which
he means the cultural modes of representation that
"simulate" reality as in television, computer cyberspace,
and virtual reality. Baudrillard's distinction between the mode
of production and utility that organized modern societies and the mode
of simulation that he believes is the organizing form of postmodern
societies postulates a rupture between modern and postmodern societies
as great as the divide between modern and premodern ones. In theorizing
the epochal postmodern rupture with modernity, he declares the
"end of political economy" and of an era in which
production was the organizing form of society. 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 the signifier/signified dialectic which facilitates
> the accumulation of knowledge and of meaning, the linear syntagma of
> cumulative discourse. And at the same time, the end simultaneously of
> the exchange value/use value dialectic which is the only thing that
> makes accumulation and social production possible. 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 1993a: 8).
> 
> 
> 




The discourse of "the end" signifies his announcing a
postmodern break or rupture in history. 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. In this
era, labor is no longer a force of production but is itself a
"one *sign* amongst many" (1993a: 10). Labor is not
primarily productive in this situation, but is a sign of one's
social position, way of life, and mode of servitude. Wages too bear no
rational relation to one's work and what one produces but to
one's place within the system (1993a: 19ff.). But, crucially,
political economy is no longer the foundation, the social determinant,
or even a structural "reality" in which other phenomena can
be interpreted and explained (31ff.). Instead people live in the
"hyperreality" of simulations in which images, spectacles,
and the play of signs replace the concepts of production and class
conflict as key constituents of contemporary societies.




From now on, capital and political economy disappear from
Baudrillard's story, or return in radically new forms.
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 1989, Norris 1992, and the studies in Kellner
1994).



*Symbolic Exchange and Death* and the succeeding studies in
*Simulation and Simulacra* (1994 [1981]) articulate the
principle of a fundamental rupture between modern and postmodern
societies and mark Baudrillard's departure from the problematic
of modern social theory. 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.[6]
In the society of
simulation, identities are constructed by the appropriation of images,
and codes and models determine how individuals perceive themselves and
relate to other people. 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.




Baudrillard's postmodern world is also one in which previously
important boundaries and distinctions -- such as those between
social classes, genders, political leanings, and once autonomous realms
of society and culture -- lose power. If modern societies, for
classical social theory, were characterized by differentiation, for
Baudrillard, postmodern societies are characterized by
dedifferentiation, the "collapse" of (the power of)
distinctions, or *implosion*. 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.g., media simulations of reality,
Disneyland and amusement parks, malls and consumer fantasylands, TV
sports, virtual reality games, social networking sites, and other
excursions into ideal worlds) is more real than real, whereby the
models, images, and codes of the hyperreal come to control thought and
behavior. Yet determination itself is aleatory in a non-linear world
where it is impossible to chart causal mechanisms in a situation in
which individuals are confronted with an overwhelming flux of images,
codes, and models, any of which may shape an individual's thought
or behavior.




In this postmodern world, individuals flee from the "desert of
the real" for the ecstasies of hyperreality and the new realm of
computer, media, and technological experience. 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. Rather, they exist in "a state of terror which is
characteristic of the schizophrenic, an over-proximity of all things, a
foul promiscuity of all things which beleaguer and penetrate him,
meeting with no resistance, and no halo, no aura, not even the aura of
his own body protects him. In spite of himself the schizophrenic is
open to everything and lives in the most extreme confusion"
(1988: 27). For Baudrillard, the "ecstasy of communication"
means that the subject is in close proximity to instantaneous images
and information, in an overexposed and transparent world. In this
situation, the subject "becomes a pure screen a pure absorption
and re-absorption surface of the influent networks" (1988: 27).
In other words, an individual in a postmodern world becomes merely an
entity influenced by media, technological experience, and the
hyperreal.




Thus, Baudrillard's categories of simulation, implosion, and
hyperreality combine to create an emergent postmodern condition that
requires entirely new modes of theory and politics to chart and respond
to the novelties of the contemporary era. His style and writing
strategies are also implosive (i.e., working against previously
important distinctions), combining material from strikingly different
fields, studded with examples from the mass media and popular culture
in an innovative mode of postmodern theory that does not respect
disciplinary boundaries. 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.g., nature, other people, ideas, and so on). Baudrillard
follows here the poststructuralist critique that thought and discourse
could no longer be securely anchored in a priori or privileged
structures of "the real." Reacting against the mode of
representation in modern theory, French thought, especially some
deconstructionists (Rorty's "strong textualists"),
moved into the play of textuality, of discourse, which allegedly
referred only to other texts or discourses in which "the
real" or an "outside" were banished to the realm of
nostalgia.




In a similar fashion, Baudrillard, a "strong
simulacrist," claims that in the media and consumer society,
people are caught up in the play of images, spectacles, and simulacra,
that have less and less relationship to an outside, to an external
"reality," to such an extent that the very concepts of the
social, political, or even "reality" no longer seem to have
any meaning. And the narcoticized and mesmerized (some of
Baudrillard's metaphors) media-saturated consciousness is in such
a state of fascination with image and spectacle that the concept of
meaning itself (which depends on stable boundaries, fixed structures,
shared consensus) dissolves. 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. Caught up in
the universe of simulations, the "masses" are "bathed
in a media massage" without messages or meaning, a mass age where
classes disappear, and politics is dead, as are the grand dreams of
disalienation, liberation, and revolution.




Baudrillard claims that henceforth the masses seek spectacle and not
meaning. They implode into a "silent majority," signifying
"the end of the social" (1983b). Baudrillard implies that
social theory loses its very object as meanings, classes, and
difference implode into a "black hole" of
non-differentiation. 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.e., the
late 1970s and early 1980s) that refusal of meaning and participation
by the masses is a form of resistance. Hovering between nostalgia and
nihilism, Baudrillard at once exterminates modern ideas (e.g., the
subject, meaning, truth, reality, society, socialism, and emancipation)
and affirms a mode of symbolic exchange which appears to manifest a
nostalgic desire to return to premodern cultural forms. This desperate
search for a genuinely revolutionary alternative was abandoned,
however, by the early 1980s. 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. In place of Marx's emphasis on political economy
and the primacy of the economic, for Baudrillard it is the model, the
superstructure, that generates the real in a situation he refers to as
the "end of political economy" (1993a). For Baudrillard,
sign values predominate over use values and exchange values; the
materiality of needs and commodity use-values to serve them disappear
in Baudrillard's semiological imaginary, in which signs take
precedence over the real and reconstruct human life. 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. Consequently, Baudrillard replaces
Marx's hard economic and social determinism with its emphasis on
the economic dimension, class struggle, and human praxis, with a form
of semiological idealism and technological determinism where signs and
objects come to dominate the subject.




Baudrillard thus concludes that the "catastrophe has
happened," that the destruction of modernity and modern theory
which he noted in the mid-1970s, has been completed by the development
of capitalist society itself, that modernity has disappeared and a new
social situation has taken its place. Against traditional strategies of
rebellion and revolution, Baudrillard begins to champion what he calls
"fatal strategies" that push the values of the system to
the extreme in the hopes of collapse or reversal, and eventually adopts
a style of highly ironic metaphysical discourse that renounces
emancipation and the discourse and hopes of progressive social
transformation.


## 3. From Pataphysics to Metaphysics and the Triumph of the Object




Baudrillard's thought from the mid-1970s to his death in 2007
challenges theories in a variety of disciplines. During the 1980s, his
major works of the 1970s were translated into many languages and new
books of the 1980s 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.




At the same time that his work was becoming extremely popular,
Baudrillard's own writing became increasingly difficult and
obscure. In 1979, he published *Seduction* (1990), 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* (1993a [1976]), 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.[7]
Baudrillard's concept of seduction is idiosyncratic and involves
games with signs which set up seduction as an aristocratic "order
of sign and ritual" in contrast to the bourgeois ideal of
production, while advocating artifice, appearance, play, and challenge
against the deadly serious labor of production. He interprets seduction
primarily as a ritual and game with its own rules, charms, snares, and
lures. His writing mutates at this point into a neo-aristocratic
aestheticism dedicated to stylized modes of thought and writing, which
present a set of categories -- reversibility, the challenge, the
duel, -- that move Baudrillard's thought toward a form of
aristocratic aestheticism and metaphysics.




Baudrillard's proliferating metaphysical speculations are
evident in *Fatal Strategies* (1983, translated in 1990),
another turning point in his career. This text presented a bizarre
metaphysical scenario concerning the triumph of objects over subjects
within the "obscene" proliferation of an object world so
completely out of control that it surpasses all attempts to understand,
conceptualize and control it. His scenario concerns the proliferation
and growing supremacy of objects over subjects and the eventual triumph
of the object. In a discussion of "Ecstasy and Inertia,"
Baudrillard discusses how objects and events in contemporary society
are continually surpassing themselves, growing and expanding in power.
The "ecstasy" of objects is their great proliferation and
expansion; ecstasy as going outside of or beyond oneself: the beautiful
as more beautiful than beautiful in fashion, the real more real than
the real in television, sex more sexual than sex in pornography.
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.




Yet growth, acceleration, and proliferation have reached such
extremes, Baudrillard suggests, that the ecstasy of excrescence (i.e.,
increasing numbers of goods) is accompanied by inertia. The process of
growth presents a catastrophe for the subject, for not only does the
acceleration and proliferation of the object world intensify the
aleatory dimension of chance and non-determinacy, but the objects
themselves come to dominate the exhausted subject, whose fascination
with the play of objects turns to apathy, stupefaction, and
inertia.




In retrospect, the growing power of the world of objects over the
subject has been Baudrillard's theme from the beginning, thus
pointing to an underlying continuity in his project. In his early
writings, he explored the ways that commodities were fascinating
individuals in the consumer society and the ways that the world of
goods was assuming new and more value through the agency of sign value
and the code -- which were part of the world of things, the system
of objects. His polemics against Marxism were fuelled by the belief
that sign value and the code were more fundamental than such
traditional elements of political economy as exchange value, use value,
production and so on in constituting contemporary society. Then,
reflections on the media entered the forefront of his thought: the TV
object was at the center of the home in Baudrillard's earlier
thinking and the media, simulations, hyperreality, and implosion
eventually came to obliterate distinctions between private and public,
inside and outside, media and reality. Henceforth, everything was
public, transparent, and hyperreal in the object world that was gaining
in fascination and seductiveness as the years went by.




In *Fatal Strategies* and succeeding writings, the object
dominates or "defeats" the subject. The "fatal
strategies" suggest that individuals should simply submit to the
strategies and ruses of objects. In "banal strategies,"
"the subject believes itself to always be more clever than the
object, whereas in the other [fatal strategies] the object is always
supposed to be more shrewd, more cynical, more brilliant than the
subject" (1983: 259-260). Previously, in banal strategies, the
subject believed itself to be more masterful and sovereign than the
object. A fatal strategy, by contrast, recognizes the supremacy of the
object and therefore takes the side of the object and surrenders to its
strategies, ruses and rules.




In these works, Baudrillard seems to be taking his theory into the
realm of metaphysics, but it is a specific type of metaphysics deeply
inspired by the pataphysics developed by Alfred Jarry. For Jarry:



> 
> 
> 
> pataphysics is the science of the realm beyond metaphysics...
> It will study the laws which govern exceptions and will explain the
> universe supplementary to this one; or, less ambitiously, it will
> describe a universe which one can see -- must see perhaps --
> instead of the traditional one...
> 
> 
> 



> 
> 
> 
> Definition: pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, which
> symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their
> virtuality, to their lineaments (Jarry 1963: 131).
> 
> 
> 




Like the universe in Jarry's *Ubu Roi*, *The
Gestures and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll* (1969), and other
literary texts -- as well as in Jarry's more theoretical
explications of pataphysics -- Baudrillard's is a totally
absurd universe where objects rule in mysterious ways, and people and
events are governed by absurd and ultimately unknowable
interconnections and predestination (The French playwright Eugene
Ionesco is another good source of entry to this universe). Like
Jarry's pataphysics, Baudrillard's universe is ruled by
surprise, reversal, hallucination, blasphemy, obscenity, and a desire
to shock and outrage.




Thus, in view of the growing supremacy of the object, Baudrillard
wants us to abandon the subject and to side with the object.
Pataphysics aside, it seems that Baudrillard is trying to end the
philosophy of subjectivity that has controlled French thought since
Descartes by going over completely to the other side. Descartes'
*malin genie*, his evil genius, was a ruse of the subject that
tried to seduce him into accepting what was not clear and distinct, but
over which he was ultimately able to prevail. Baudrillard's
"evil genius" is the object itself which is much worse than
the merely epistemological deceptions of the subject faced by Descartes
and which constitutes a fatal destiny that demands the end of the
philosophy of subjectivity. Henceforth, for Baudrillard, people live in
the era of the reign of the object.


## 4. Into the 1990s: From Immanent Reversal to Impossible Exchange




In the 1980s, Baudrillard posited an "immanent
reversal," a flip-flop or reversed direction of meaning and
effects, in which things turn into their opposite. Thus, according to
Baudrillard, the society of production was passing over to simulation
and seduction; the panoptic and repressive power theorized by Foucault
was turning into a cynical and seductive power of the media and
information society; the liberation championed in the 1960s had become
a form of voluntary servitude; sovereignty had passed from the side of
the subject to the object; and revolution and emancipation had turned
into their opposites, trapping individuals in an order of simulation
and virtuality. Baudrillard's concept of "immanent
reversal" thus provides a perverse form of Horkheimer and
Adorno's "dialectic of Enlightenment" (1972 [1947]),
where everything becomes its opposite. For Adorno and Horkheimer,
within the transformations of organized and hi-tech capitalism, modes
of Enlightenment become domination, culture becomes culture industry,
democracy becomes a form of mass manipulation, and science and
technology form a crucial part of an apparatus of social
domination.




Baudrillard follows this concept of reversal and his paradoxical and
nihilistic metaphysical vision into the 1990s and 2000s where his
thought becomes ever more hermetic, fragmentary, and difficult. During
the decade, Baudrillard continued playing the role of academic and
media superstar, traveling around the world lecturing and performing in
intellectual events.




Retiring from the University of Nanterre in 1987, Baudrillard
subsequently functioned as an independent intellectual, dedicating
himself to caustic reflections on our contemporary moment and
philosophical ruminations that cultivate his distinct and always
evolving theory. From June 1987 through May 1997, he published
reflections on events and phenomena of the day in the Paris newspaper
*Liberation*, a series of writings collected in *Screened
Out* (2002 [2000]) and providing access to a laboratory for ideas
later elaborated in his books.




During the 1990s and until his death, Baudrillard continued to write
short journal entries and by 2007 had published five volumes of his
*Cool Memories.* These texts combine reflections on his travels
and experiences with development of his (often recycled) ideas and
perceptions. Baudrillard's fragmentary diaries often provide
revealing insights into his personal life and psychology, as well as
capturing experiences and scenes that generate or embody some of his
ideas. While often repetitive, his "cool memory" booklets
provide direct access to the man and his ideas, as well as validating
him as a global intellectual superstar who travels around the earth and
whose every diary notation is worthy of publication and attention.




Baudrillard also produced reflections on contemporary issues like
the Gulf War, the September 11 terror attacks, that he saw as the only
real "event" of the past decades, globalization, the US
invasion of Iraq, and other occurrences of the
 day.[8]
Baudrillard also continued his metaphysical
speculations in works such as *The Transparency of Evil* (1993
[1990]), *The Illusion of the End* (1994b [1992]), *The
Perfect Crime* (1996b [1995]), *Impossible Exchange* (2001
[1999]), *The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucicity Pact* (2005),
and *The Conspiracy of Art* (2005). These texts continue his
excursions into the metaphysics of the object and defeat of the subject
and ironical engagement with contemporary history and politics.
Bringing together reflections that develop his ideas and/or comment on
contemporary events, these texts continue to postulate a break within
history in the space of a postmodern *coupure*, though
Baudrillard himself usually distances himself from other versions of
postmodern
 theory.[9]




Baudrillard's retirement from a sociology faculty seemed to have
liberated his philosophical impulses and in addition to his diary
collections and occasional forays into engagement of issues of the
day, Baudrillard turned out a series of increasingly philosophical and
densely theoretical texts. The post-1990 texts continue the
fragmentary style and use of short essays, aphorisms, stories, and
apercus that Baudrillard began deploying in the 1980s and often
repeat some of the same ideas and stories. While the books develop the
quasi-metaphysical perspectives of the 1980s, they also generate some
new ideas and positions. They are often entertaining, although they
can also be outrageous and scandalous. These writings can be read as a
combination of cultivation of original theoretical perspectives along
with continual commentary on current social conditions, accompanied by
a running dialogue with Marxism, poststructuralist theory, and other
forms of contemporary thought. Yet after his fierce and focused
polemics of the 1970s against competing models of thought,
Baudrillard's later dialogues with theory consist mostly of
occasional asides and recycling of previous ideas, a retro-theory that
perhaps ironically illustrates his theses about the decline of theory
and politics in the contemporary moment.




In *The Transparency of Evil* (1993), Baudrillard described a
situation in which previously separate domains of the economy, art,
politics, and sexuality, collapsed into each other. He claims that art,
for instance, has penetrated all spheres of existence, whereby the
dreams of the artistic avant-garde for art to inform life has been
realized. Yet, in Baudrillard's vision, with the realization of
art in everyday life, art itself as a separate and transcendent
phenomenon has disappeared.




Baudrillard calls this situation "transaesthetics" which
he relates to similar phenomena of "transpolitics,"
"transsexuality," and "transeconomics," in
which everything becomes political, sexual, and economic, so that these
domains, like art, lose their specificity, their boundaries, and their
distinctness. The result is a confused condition where there are no
more criteria of value, of judgement, or of taste, and the function of
the normative thus collapses in a morass of indifference and inertia.
And so, although Baudrillard sees art proliferating everywhere, and
writes in *The Transparency of Evil* that "talk about Art
is increasing even more rapidly" (p. 14), the power of art
-- of art as adventure, art as negation of reality, art as
redeeming illusion, art as another dimension and so on -- has
disappeared. Art is everywhere but there "are no more fundamental
rules" to differentiate art from other objects and "no more
criteria of judgement or of pleasure" (p. 14). For Baudrillard,
contemporary individuals are indifferent toward taste and manifest only
distaste: "tastes are determinate no longer" (p. 72).




And yet as a proliferation of images, of form, of line, of color, of
design, art is more fundamental then ever to the contemporary social
order: "our society has given rise to a general aestheticization:
all forms of culture -- not excluding anti-cultural ones --
are promoted and all models of representation and anti-representation
are taken on board" (p. 16). Thus Baudrillard concludes that:
"It is often said that the West's great undertaking is the
commercialization of the whole world, the hitching of the fate of
everything to the fate of the commodity. That great undertaking will
turn out rather to have been the aestheticization of the whole world
-- its cosmopolitan spectacularization, its transformation into
images, its semiological organization" (p. 16).




In the postmodern media and consumer society, everything becomes an
image, a sign, a spectacle, a transaesthetic object -- just as
everything also becomes trans-economic, trans-political, and
trans-sexual. This "*materialization* of aesthetics"
is accompanied by a desperate attempt to simulate art, to replicate and
mix previous artistic forms and styles, and to produce ever more images
and artistic objects. But this "dizzying eclecticism" of
forms and pleasures produces a situation in which art is no longer art
in classical or modernist senses but is merely image, artifact, object,
simulation, or commodity (Baudrillard is aware of increasingly
exorbitant prices for art works, but takes this as evidence that art
has become something else in the orbital hyperspace of value, an
ecstasy of skyrocketing values in "a kind of space opera"
[p. 19]).




Examples of the paradoxical and ironic style of Baudrillard's
philosophical musings abound in *The Perfect Crime* (1996b).
Baudrillard claims that the negation of a transcendent reality in the
current media and technological society is a "perfect
crime" that involves the "destruction of the real."
In a world of appearance, image, and illusion, Baudrillard suggests,
reality disappears although its traces continue to nourish an illusion
of the real. Driven toward virtualization in a high-tech society, all
the imperfections of human life and the world are eliminated in virtual
reality, but this is the elimination of reality itself, the Perfect
Crime. This "post-critical" and "catastrophic"
state of affairs render our previous conceptual world irrelevant,
Baudrillard suggests, urging criticism to turn ironic and transform the
demise of the real into an art form.




Baudrillard has entered a world of thought far from academic
philosophy, one that puts in question traditional modes of thought and
discourse. His search for new philosophical perspectives has won him a
loyal global audience, but also criticism for his excessive irony, word
play, and intellectual games. Yet his work stands as a provocation to
traditional and contemporary philosophy that challenges thinkers to
address old philosophical problems such as truth and reality in new
ways in the contemporary world.




Baudrillard continues this line of thought in his 1999 text
*Impossible Exchange* (2001). In three parts containing a series
of short essays, he first develops his concept of an "impossible
exchange" between concepts and the world, theory and reality, and
subject and object. He attacks philosophical attempts to capture
reality, arguing for an incommensurability between concepts and their
objects, systems of thought and the world. For Baudrillard, the latter
always elude capture by the former, thus philosophy is an
"impossible exchange" in which it is impossible to grasp
the truth of the world, to attain certainty, to establish a foundation
for philosophy, and/or produce a defensible philosophical system.




In retrospect, Baudrillard's philosophical play with the
subject/object distinction, his abandonment of the subject, and going
over to the side of the object is a key aspect of his thought. He
identifies this dichotomy with the duality of good and evil in which
the cultivation of the subject and its domination of the object is
taken as the good within Western thought, while the sovereignty and
side of the object is interwoven with the principle of evil.
Baudrillard's thought is radically dualistic and he takes the
side of the pole within a series of dichotomies of Western thought that
has generally been derided as inferior, such as siding with appearance
against reality, illusion over truth, evil over good, and woman over
man. In *The Perfect Crime* (1996b), Baudrillard has declared
that reality has been destroyed and henceforth that people live in a
world of mere appearance. In this universe, certainty and truth are
impossible and Baudrillard takes the side of illusion, arguing in
*Impossible Exchange* (2001) that: "Illusion is the
fundamental rule" (p. 6).




Baudrillard also argues that the world is without meaning and that
affirming meaninglessness is liberating: "If we could accept this
meaninglessness of the world, then we could play with forms,
appearances and our impulses, without worrying about their ultimate
destination... As Cioran says, we are not failures until we
believe life has a meaning - and from that point on we are
failures, because it hasn't" (2001: 128). Most
controversially, Baudrillard also identifies with the principle of evil
defined as that which is opposed to and against the good. There is an
admittedly Manichean and Gnostic dimension to his thought, mixed with
skepticism, cynicism and
 nihilism.[10]
Deconstruction, however, takes apart the
subject/object dichotomy indicating the impossibly of taking the side
of subject or object, or of good and evil as both are interconnected
with each other and there can be no pure object without subject and
vice versa, an argument Adorno has
 made.[11]
Baudrillard's thought is intrinsically
dualistic and not dialectical. His thought is self-avowedly agonistic
with the duel presented in tandem with his dualism, taking on and
attacking rival theories and positions. Contradictions do not bother
Baudrillard, for indeed he affirms them. It is thus tricky to argue
with Baudrillard on strictly philosophical grounds and one needs to
grasp his mode of writing, his notion of theory fictions (see
 Section 5),
and to engage their saliency and effects.


## 5. Theory Fictions: Baudrillard in the Contemporary Moment




Baudrillard develops what he terms "theory fiction," or
what he also calls "simulation theory" and
"anticipatory theory." Such "theory" intends to
simulate, grasp, and anticipate historical events, that he believes are
continually outstripping all contemporary theory. The current
situation, he claims, is more fantastic than the most fanciful science
fiction, or theoretical projections of a futurist society. Thus, theory
can only attempt to grasp the present on the run and try to anticipate
the future. However, he has had a mixed record as a social and
political analyst and forecaster. As a political analyst, he has often
been superficial and off the mark. In an essay "Anorexic
Ruins" published in 1989, he read the Berlin wall as a sign of a
frozen history, of an anorexic history, in which nothing more can
happen, marked by a "lack of events" and the end of
history, taking the Berlin wall as a sign of a stasis between communism
and capitalism. Shortly thereafter, rather significant events destroyed
the wall that Baudrillard took as permanent and opened up a new
historical era.




The Cold War stalemate was long taken by Baudrillard as establishing
a frozen history in which no significant change could take place.
Already in his mid-1970s reflections, he presented the Vietnam war as
an "alibi" to incorporate China, Russia, and eventually
Vietnam into a more rationalized and modernized world economic and
political order (Baudrillard 1983a: 66f), and in his book on the Gulf
war he repeats this claim (1995: 85), thus failing to see the actual
political stakes and reasons for the Vietnam war, as well as the
significance of the struggles between capitalist and
communist
 blocs.[12]




For Baudrillard, the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New
York also symbolized the frozen history and stasis between the two
systems of capitalism and communism. On the whole, he sees history as
the unfolding of expanding technological rationality turning into its
opposite, as the system incorporates ever more elements, producing an
improved technological order, which then becomes irrational through its
excesses, its illusions, and its generating unforeseen consequences.
This mode of highly abstract analysis, however, occludes more specific
historical determinants that would analyze how technological
rationality is constructed and functioned and how and why it misfires.
It also covers over the disorder and turmoil created by such things as
the crises and restructuring of global capitalism, the rise of
fundamentalism, ethnic conflict, and global terrorism which were
unleashed in part as a response to a globalized rationalization of the
market system and to the breakup of the bipolar world order.




Baudrillard's reflections on the Gulf war take a similar
position, seeing it as an attempt of the New World Order to further
rationalize the world, arguing that the Gulf war really served to bring
Islam into the New World Order (1995: 19). The first study titled
"The Gulf war will not take place" was initially published
a few days before the actual outbreak of military hostilities and
repeats his earlier concept of "weak events" and frozen
history. Baudrillard to the contrary, the Gulf war took place, but this
did not deter him from publishing studies claiming during the episode
that it was not "really taking place" and after the war
asserting that it "did not take place" -- arguing that
it was a media spectacle and not a genuine war. Baudrillard does not
help us to understand much about the event and does not even help us to
grasp the role of the media in contemporary political spectacles.
Reducing complex events like wars to categories like simulation or
hyperreality illuminates the virtual and high-tech dimension to media
events, but erases all their concrete determinants. And yet
Baudrillardian postmodern categories help grasp some of the dynamics of
the culture of living in media and computer worlds where people seem to
enjoy immersing themselves in simulated events (witness the fascination
of the Gulf war in 1991, the O.J. Simpson trials during 1994-6, the
Clinton sex scandals, and various other media spectacles throughout the
1990s, and the September 11 terror attacks in the early days of the
third
 millennium).[13]




In *The End of the Illusion* (1994b), Baudrillard attacks
head-on what he sees as current illusions of history, politics, and
metaphysics, and gamely tries to explain away his own political
misprognoses that contemporary history appeared in a frozen, glacial
state, stalemated between East and West, that the system of deterrence
had congealed, making sure that nothing dramatic could henceforth
happen, that the Gulf war couldn't take place, and that the end
of history had occurred. Baudrillard unleashes his full bag of
rhetorical tricks and philosophical analysis to attempt to maintain
these hypotheses in the face of the dramatic events of 1989-1991, which
he claims are in fact "weak events," that events are still
on strike, that history has indeed
 disappeared.[14]
He continues to argue that modernity as a
historical epoch is over, with its political conflicts and upheavals,
its innovations and revolutions, its autonomous and creative subject,
and its myths of progress, democracy, Enlightenment, and the like.
These myths, these strong ideas, are exhausted, he claims, and
henceforth a postmodern era of banal eclecticism, inertial implosion,
and eternal recycling of the same become defining features.




For Baudrillard by the end of the 1990s with the collapse of
communism, the era of the strong ideas, of a conflicted world of
revolution and universal emancipation, is over. Communism, on his
reading, collapsed of its own inertia, it self-destructed from within,
it imploded, rather than perishing in ideological battle or military
warfare. With the absorption of its dissidents into power, there is no
longer a clash of strong ideas, of opposition and resistance, of
critical transcendence. With the embedding of the former communist
regimes into the system of the capitalist world market and liberal
democracy, the West no longer has an Other to battle against, there is
no longer any creative or ideological tension, no longer any global
alternative to the Western world.




Baudrillard celebrated the coming of the new millennium with a
recycling of some his old ideas on cloning, the end of history, and the
disappearance of the real in a series of lectures collected as *The
Vital Illusion* (2000). For Baudrillard (2000), cloning is
connected to the fantasy of immortality, to defeating the life-cycle.
Thus, it is no surprise that cryogenics -- the freezing of dead
human beings in the hope they might be regenerated in the future
through medical advances -- is a booming global industry.
Likewise, in a digital era, he claims that history has come to an end
and reality has been killed by virtualization, as the human species
prepares itself for a virtual existence. Baudrillard complained that
the contemporary era was one of weak events, that no major historical
occurrences had happened, and that therefore life and thought were
becoming increasingly boring.




Shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Baudrillard wrote
a paper "L'esprit du terrorisme" published November
2, 2001, in *Le Monde.* He argued that the assaults on the World
Trade Center and Pentagon constituted a "strong event,"
that the attacks were "the ultimate event, the mother of all
events, the pure event uniting within itself all the events that have
never taken place." The "event strike," Baudrillard
declared, was over and since this time he has continued to focus
intensely on the dynamics and happenings of contemporary history.




Hence, Baudrillard's thought was reignited by 9/11 and the
subsequent Terror War which demonstrate the continuing relevance of
some of his key categories and that produced some of his most
provocative later work. He had long written on terrorism and was
focusing reflection on globalization when the 9/11 attacks occurred. He
quickly responded with the *Le Monde* article, soon after
translated and expanded into one of the more challenging and
controversial books on the terror spectacle, *The Spirit of
Terrorism: And Requiem for the Twin Towers* (2002a). For
Baudrillard, the 9/11 attacks represent a new kind of terrorism,
exhibiting a "form of action which plays the game, and lays hold
of the rules of the game, solely with the aim of disrupting it...
they have taken over all the weapons of the dominant
power". That is, the terrorists in Baudrillard's
reading used airplanes, computer networks, and the media associated
with Western societies to produce a spectacle of terror. The attacks
evoked a global specter of terror that the very system of globalization
and Western capitalism and culture were under assault by "the
spirit of terrorism" and potential terrorist attacks anytime and
anywhere.




For Baudrillard, "the speeches and commentaries made since
September 11 betray a gigantic post-traumatic abreaction both to the
event itself and to the fascination that it exerts. The moral
condemnation and the sacred union against terrorism are directly
proportional to the prodigious jubilation felt at having seen this
global superpower destroyed." Baudrillard perceived that the
terrorists hope that the system will overreact in response to the
multiple challenges of terrorism: "It is the terrorist model to
bring about an excess of reality, and have the system collapse beneath
that excess".




In Baudrillard's view, the 9/11 attacks represented "the
clash of triumphant globalization at war with itself" and
unfolded a "fourth world war": "The first put an end
to European supremacy and to the era of colonialism; the second put an
end to Nazism; and the third to Communism. Each one brought us
progressively closer to the single world order of today, which is now
nearing its end, everywhere opposed, everywhere grappling with hostile
forces. This is a war of fractal complexity, waged worldwide against
rebellious singularities that, in the manner of antibodies, mount a
resistance in every cell." (Sokal and Bricmont (1998) have
criticized Baudrillard for such metaphoric use of scientific
terminology.)




Upon the initial publication of his response in French newspapers
and its immediate translation into English and other languages,
Baudrillard himself was accused of justifying terrorism when he stated
in the article in *Le Monde*: "Because it was this
insufferable superpower [i.e., the US] that gave rise both to the
violence now spreading throughout the world and to the terrorist
imagination that (without our knowing it) dwells within us all. That
the entire world without exception had dreamed of this event, that
nobody could help but dream of the destruction of so powerful a Hegemon
-- this fact is unacceptable to the moral conscience of the West.
And yet it's a fact nevertheless, a fact that resists the
emotional violence of all the rhetoric conspiring to cover it up. In
the end, it was they who did it, but we who wished
 it."[15]




Baudrillard defended himself from accusations that such reflections
constituted a virulent anti-Americanism or legitimation of terrorism,
claiming: "I do not praise murderous attacks -- that would
be idiotic. Terrorism is not a contemporary form of revolution against
oppression and capitalism. No ideology, no struggle for an objective,
not even Islamic fundamentalism, can explain it. ...I have
glorified nothing, accused nobody, justified nothing. One should not
confuse the messenger with his message. I have endeavored to analyze
the process through which the unbounded expansion of globalization
creates the conditions for its own
 destruction".[16]




Indeed, Baudrillard has also produced some provocative reflections
on globalization. In "The Violence of the Global," he
distinguishes between the global and the universal, linking
globalization with technology, the market, tourism, and information
contrasted to identification of the universal with "human rights,
liberty, culture, and
 democracy."[17]
While "globalization appears to be
irreversible, ... universalization is likely to be on its way
out." Elsewhere, Baudrillard writes: "...the idea of
freedom, a new and recent idea, is already fading from the minds and
mores, and liberal globalization is coming about in precisely the
opposite form -- a police-state globalization, a total control, a
terror based on 'law-and-order' measures. Deregulation ends
up in a maximum of constraints and restrictions, akin to those of a
fundamentalist
 society."[18]




Many see globalization as a matrix of market economy, democracy,
technology, migration and tourism, and the worldwide circulation of
ideas and culture. Baudrillard, curiously, takes the position of those
in the anti-globalization movement who condemn globalization as the
opposite of democracy and human rights. For him, globalization is
fundamentally a process of homogenization and standardization that
crushes "the singular" and heterogeneity. This position,
however, fails to note the contradictions that globalization
simultaneously produces homogenization and hybridization and
difference, and that the anti-corporate globalization movement is
fighting for social justice, democratization, and increased rights,
factors that Baudrillard links with a dying universalization. In fact,
the struggle for rights and justice is an important part of
globalization and Baudrillard's presenting of human rights,
democratization, and justice as part of an obsolete universalization
being erased by globalization is theoretically and
politically
 problematical.[19]




Before 9/11, Baudrillard saw globalization and technological
development producing standardization and virtualization that was
erasing individuality, social struggle, critique and reality itself as
more and more people became absorbed in the hyper and virtual realities
of media and cyberspace and virtual culture. This disappearance of
reality constituted the "perfect crime" which is the
subject of a book of that title (1996b) and elaborated in *The Vital
Illusion* (2000). Baudrillard presents himself here as a detective
searching for the perpetrator of the "perfect crime," the
murder of reality, "the most important event of modern
history." His recurrent theme is the destruction and
disappearance of the real in the realm of information and simulacra,
and the subsequent reign of illusion and appearance. In a Nietzschean
mode, he suggests that henceforth truth and reality are illusions, that
illusions reign, and that therefore people should respect illusion and
appearance and give up the illusory quest for truth and reality.




Yet in the 9/11 attacks and subsequent Terror War, difference and
conflict have erupted upon the global stage and heterogeneous forces
that global capitalism appears unable to absorb and assimilate have
emerged that have produced what appears to be an era of intense
conflict. Ideological apologists of globalization such as Thomas
Friedman have been forced to acknowledge that globalization has its
dark sides and produces conflict as well as networking, interrelations,
and progress. It remains to be seen, of course, how the current Terror
War and intensified global conflicts will be resolved.


## 6. Concluding Assessment




Baudrillard has never been as influential in France as in the
English-speaking world and elsewhere - a point made in many
French obituaries upon his death. He is an example of the
"global popular," a thinker who has
followers and readers throughout the world, though, so far, no
Baudrillardian school has
 emerged.[20]
Baudrillard's influence has been largely at
the margins of a diverse number of disciplines ranging from social
theory to philosophy to art history, thus it is difficult to gauge his
impact on philosophy or the mainstream of any specific academic
discipline.




Baudrillard is perhaps most important as part of the postmodern turn
against modern society and its academic disciplines. His work cuts
across the disciplines and promotes cross-disciplinary thought. He
challenges standard wisdom and puts in question received dogma and
methods. While his early work on the consumer society, the political
economy of the sign, simulation and simulacra, and the implosion of
phenomena previously separated can be deployed within critical
philosophy and social theory, much of his post-1980s work quite
self-consciously goes beyond the classical tradition and in most
interviews of the past decade Baudrillard distances himself from
critical philosophy and social theory, claiming that the energy of
critique has dissipated.




Baudrillard thus emerges in retrospect as a transdisciplinary
theorist of the end of modernity who produces sign-posts to the new era
of postmodernity and is an important, albeit hardly trustworthy, guide
to the new era. One can read Baudrillard's post-1970s work as
science fiction that anticipates the future by exaggerating present
tendencies, and thus provides early warnings about what might happen if
present trends continue (Kellner 1995). It is not an accident that
Baudrillard is an aficionado of science fiction, who has himself
influenced a large number of contemporary science fiction writers and
filmmakers of the contemporary era, including *The Matrix*
(1999) where his work is
 cited.[21]




However, in view of his exaggeration of the alleged break with
modernity, it is ambiguous whether Baudrillard's last two decades
of work is best read as science fiction or theory. He obviously wants
to have it both ways with social theorists thinking that he provides
salient perspectives on contemporary social realities, that Baudrillard
reveals what is really happening, that he tells it like it is. And yet
more cynical anti-sociologists are encouraged to enjoy
Baudrillard's fictions, his experimental discourse, his games,
and play. Likewise, he sometimes encourages cultural metaphysicians to
read his work as serious reflections on the realities of our time,
while winking a pataphysical aside at those skeptical of such
undertakings. And Baudrillard's philosophical writings provoke
philosophers to defend their positions against his and to rethink
certain traditional questions in the light of contemporary
realities.




Thus, it is difficult to decide whether Baudrillard is best read as
science fiction and pataphysics, or as philosophy, social theory, and
cultural metaphysics, and whether his post-1970s work should be read
under the sign of truth or fiction. In retrospect, Baudrillard's
early critical explorations of the system of objects and consumer
society contain some of his most important contributions to
contemporary social theory. His mid-1970s analysis of a dramatic
mutation occurring within contemporary societies and rise of a new mode
of simulation, which sketched out the effects of media and information
on society as a whole, is also original and important. But at this
stage of his work, Baudrillard falls prey to a technological
determinism and semiological idealism which posits an autonomous
technology and play of signs generating a society of simulation which
creates a postmodern break and the proliferation of signs, spectacles,
and simulacra. Baudrillard erases autonomous and differentiated spheres
of the economy, polity, society, and culture posited by classical
social theory in favor of an implosive theory that also crosses
disciplinary boundaries, thus mixing philosophy and social theory into
a broader form of social diagnosis and philosophical play.




In the final analysis, Baudrillard is perhaps more useful as a
provocateur who challenges and puts in question the tradition of
classical philosophy and social theory than as someone who provides
concepts and methods that can be applied in philosophical, social or
cultural analysis. He claims that the object of classical social theory
-- modernity -- has been surpassed by a new postmodernity and
that therefore alternative theoretical strategies, modes of writing,
and forms of theory are necessary. While his work on simulation and the
postmodern break from the mid-1970s into the 1980s provides a
paradigmatic postmodern theory and analysis of postmodernity that has
been highly influential, and that despite its exaggerations continues
to be of use in interpreting present social trends, his later work is
arguably of more literary interest. Baudrillard thus ultimately goes
beyond philosophy and classical social theory altogether into a new
sphere and mode of writing that provides occasional biting critical
insights into contemporary social phenomena and provocative critiques
of contemporary and classical philosophy and social theory. He now
appears, in retrospect, as a completely idiosyncratic thinker who went
his own way and developed his own mode of writing and thought that will
continue to provoke contemporary and future students of philosophy and
critical theory.