Jean Baudrillard is known as a “postmodernist philosopher”. He began his academic career as an out-an-out Marxist, but later rebelled against Marxism. Yet, like Marx himself and his relation to Hegel, Baudrillard would have been nothing without Marxism. He bounced off Marx’s work. He used Marx’s technical terms. He was essentially parasitical on Marxism. Yet Baudrillard also believed that he’d transcended Marxism as a whole. The argument in this essay is that, in many ways, he didn’t.
Most of Baudrillard’s quoted words in this essay come from his book Symbolic Exchange and Death.
In concrete biographical terms, Jean Baudrillard wrote his doctoral thesis on the “consumer society” from a Marxist point of view. He was also once a member of the Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism) group. This group, which existed in France from the 1940s to the late 1960s, offered a revolutionary route towards socialism.
The following is the World Socialist Web Site on Baudrillard:
“Baudrillard became a teaching assistant in September 1966 at Nanterre University in Paris. As the student revolt swept Paris in 1968, Baudrillard sympathised with the radical students at his university and cooperated with the journal *Utopie*, which espoused anarchist theories spiced by quasi-Marxist phraseology.
“Following the betrayal of the workers’ and student revolts by the French Communist Party, and the ebbing of a wave of radicalism across Europe, Baudrillard joined a growing number of French intellectuals who sought to rapidly ditch their radical pasts.”
Jean Baudrillard Defines Marxism
It’s helpful that Baudrillard spelt out what Marxism is (or what he took it to be) in a rare bit of clear prose. He wrote:
“The critique of political economy begins with social production or the mode of production as its reference. The concept of production alone allows us, by means of an analysis of that unique commodity called labour power, to extract a *surplus* (a surplus-value) which controls the rational dynamics of capital as as its beyond, the revolution.”
It’s hard to say what Marxists will make of that simple account, but it seems correct to me. But note how Baudrillard slipped in the out-of-place technical term “reference” into his account. He did so to prepare the way for his later stress on reference or “referential systems”. [See my ‘How Jean Baudrillard (the Philosopher) Tried to Annihilate the World’.]
In any case, perhaps the precise Marxist details don’t matter because Baudrillard went on to argue that “[t]oday everything has changed again”. In what way? In this way:
“Production, the commodity form, labour power, equivalence and surplus-value, which together formed the outline of a quantitative, material and measurable configuration, are now things of the past.”
Even a non-Marxist would deem this categorical claim about “production”, “labour power”, etc. being “things of the past” to be incredible. However, if you buy into Baudrillard’s total philosophical vision, then it kind of makes sense.
At least Baudrillard’s account of Marxism shows the “quantitative” and “measurable” (therefore scientific?) nature of “old-style Marxism”. (This account would fit well in a beginner’s book on Marxist economics.) Baudrillard’s point was that there is more to the game than production, labour power and surplus-value. Marxists would agree with that. Yet Marxists would still have argued that production, labour power and surplus-value are the essential core of capitalism…
Now that’s what Baudrillard had a problem with. To him, “the system of signs” is at the core of capitalism. In other words, the Marxist superstructure is at the heart of capitalism. Or, to use Baudrillard’s own words, what we now have is the “metamorphosis of capital under the sign of the structural law of value”.
Isn’t this a simple inversion of Marx’s categories on Baudrillard’s part?
Jean Baudrillard as a (Non-Marxist) Radical
Baudrillard was attempting to outdo Marxists. He explicitly stated that he wanted “to discover the rule of the game [in order to] destroy the logical network of the agencies of capital”… However! Baudrillard also wanted to discover the rule of the game of “the Marxian categories which analyse it” too! Why so? It was because Baudrillard believed that Marxian “categories are again only an appearance at the second degree of capital, its critical appearance”.
Baudrillard even stated that “the revolution [shouldn’t be] staked on the mode of production” or “the commodity law of value”: it should be staked on signs. But this wasn’t simply to make socialism more radical because Baudrillard’s position (or the state of affairs in his day) wasn’t a “socialist outcome [ ] Oh dear”.
All this is very hard to interpret. It suggests that Marxian categories are as much a part of “capital” as the explicit defences of capital. To Baudrillard, even though Marxists were “critical” of capitalism, they (or their words) are still an “appearance” of capitalism. This parallels Derrida’s admission that he had to work within “the syntax and system” of Western metaphysics even when he was deconstructing Western metaphysics. [See my ‘Derrida’s 1967 Groundwork for the Destruction of Western Metaphysics’.] Similarly, Marxists must work with the domain of capitalism even when they’re offering “critiques of capitalism”.
In an obvious sense, then, it’s true that Marxists live and breathe within capitalist states and societies. But did Baudrillard mean more than that? Well, perhaps only in the sense that he focussed on such things as “signification”, “signs”, “hyperreality”, etc.
Marx’s Substructure
According to Baudrillard, Marx believed that production is everything. He went on to say that “[a]rt, religion and duty have no real history for Marx”. Instead:
“[O]nly production has a history, or, rather, it *is* history, it grounds history.”
Yet, according to Baudrillard, labour is an “incredible fabrication”.
Baudrillard basically argued that Marx had set up a new philosophical reality-appearance distinction between production and its epiphenomena (i.e., art, religion, and duty). That seems right. After all, one of the reasons why Marxists today don’t have anything critical to say about Islamism is that they deem it to be a mere epiphenomenon of, if not of production, then of the evils of Western capitalism. In other words, Islamism is nothing but a necessary response to what the capitalist West has done in Muslim countries. [See here.]
According to (Baudrillard’s) Marx, production is “an original process [ ] the process at the origin of all others”. To Baudrillard, on the other hand, “production and labour [constitute a] particular phase, in the order of signs”.
Baudrillard believed that Marx essentialised labour and production (as well as surplus-value, etc.).
So did Baudrillard do the same to art, religion, signs, media, advertising, etc?
It wasn’t just religion that was deemed to be an epiphenomenon (or part of the superstructure), Baudrillard picked up on the other things which contemporary Marxists deem to be epiphenomena too.
To Baudrillard, epiphenomena are reality. Or at least they’re what’s important when it comes to capitalism. In Baudrillard’s own words:
“Today we know that it is at the level of reproduction (fashion, the media, advertising, information and communication networks), at the level of what Marx rather carelessly used to call the faux frais of capital (immense historical irony!), that is, in the sphere of simulacra and the code, that the unity of the whole process of capital is formed.”
Thus, the causal arrow in Marxism is from production (or capital) to fashion, the media, advertising, etc., whereas, to Baudrillard, the arrow is from fashion, the media, advertising, etc. to, not capital (or production), but… to everything.
It may be argued that Baudrillard simply negated the arrow, rather than inverted it. But that’s hard to see. Simulacra really do take the position of Marx’s “means of production” (or substructure) in Baudrillard’s postmodernist philosophy. After all, Baudrillard went on to say that “the real message, the real ultimatum, lay in reproduction itself”. Indeed, “[s]imulacra prevail over history”.
That said, some readers may well see how the media, advertising, information and communication networks (if not fashion) do indeed constitute “the unity of the whole process of capital”. Yet wouldn’t the solution to this arrow of causation simply be to see it with two (equal) arrow points, rather than with one or its inversion? Indeed, isn’t this how Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, etc. saw things? [See cultural Marxism.]
Labour and Production
Basically, Baudrillard believed that the main problem with Marxism is not its claims to truth or to a scientific status (something which is hardly stressed at all by contemporary Marxists), but its philosophical realism.
Here’s Baudrillard laying out the old order of designation and reality:
“In the past, labour was used to designate the reality of a social production and a social objective of accumulating wealth. Even capital and surplus-value exploited it.”
Instead of this Marxist reality, Baudrillard argued that we really have “an immense ritual of the signs of labour [which] extends over society in general”. That’s because labour “reproduces itself”. Labour doesn’t produce anything. Or, less strongly, “it matters little whether or not it produces”.
Clearly, readers now need to know what Baudrillard meant by the word “reproduces”, and how it ties to labour.
Baudrillard believed that talk of “the workers”, production, and class consciousness was really all about image and rhetoric. To him, labour
“is much more effective to socialise by means of rituals and signs than by the bound energies of production”.
[Baudrillard probably had in mind Red flags, May Day celebrations, socialist anthems, socialist iconography, etc.]
Labour and workers are “asked only to become socialised, not to produce”. Basically, workers are brought into the capitalist system of signs without any problem whatsoever. (Like punk, and, before that, “hippy” culture.) The “rituals” of trade unions, activists, rhetoric, etc. are all accommodated — or socialised — by Das System.
Baudrillard played down labour (or the substructure) again when he said it “has become one sign amongst many”. But what follows is hard to decipher. He told his readers that labour is
“exchanged against non-labour, leisure, in accordance with a total equivalence, it is commutable with every other sector of life”.
Thus, a Marxist can agree with the statement that labour is “exchanged against non-labour”, but he won’t be happy with the the last claim that it’s “commutable with every other sector of life” too. The refence to “total equivalence” (i.e., outside systems of signs) is something that Baudrillard was suspicious of, partly because it seems to be a matter of metaphysics and faith that there can be such a thing as total equivalence — regardless if labour is paid very well or very badly. However, wasn’t Baudrillard correct to argue that seeing production and labour as the ultimate metaphysical substructure amounts to metaphysical nonsense?
Anyway, in line with all this, Baudrillard went on to say that labour is
“[n]o more or less ‘alienated’, it is no longer a unique, historical ‘praxis’ giving rise to unique social relations”.
Instead, labour is “now only a set of signing operations”.
Readers can agree with large parts of Baudrillard’s critique of Marxism, yet not also endorse his stress on (in this case) “signing operations”. In other words, his critique of Marxism may stand apart from his postmodernist stress on signs, hyperreality, etc. Baudrillard’s fans, on the other hand, may say that the two come together.
Technology and Production
Now take this passage:
“[Walter] Benjamin was also the first (with McLuhan after him) to grasp technology as a medium rather than a ‘productive force’) at which point the Marxian analysis retreats [ ].”
Why can’t technology be the result of production, be involved in production, and also be a medium (presumably of information, messages, etc.)? Why the the binarism from Baudrillard? In addition, readers can accept that technology is a result of production, etc. without also relying on any “Marxian analysis”. Marx did well to focus on production, but Baudrillard, in his own binary manner, simply erased it — or at least he interpreted it in such a way that it becomes something hardly anyone else would recognise.
Baudrillard then claimed that technology is now the “form and principle of an entirely new generation of meaning”. So do Baudrillard’s own words constitute an entirely new generation of meaning? Of course, Baudrillard’s fans and defenders would say that the meaning is dependent on the context of all the other words which surround it — and much else. But that way in can’t be guaranteed either. And let’s not forget that it’s written into Symbolic Exchange and Death that Baudrillard didn’t need to argue his case or provide evidence. Instead, we have a simulacrum of philosophy that’s all style, exaggeration, poeticism, generalisation and hype.
The most charitable take would be to say that technology is responsible for producing an entirely new generation of meaning. But Baudrillard simply didn’t say that. The best Baudrillard could do by way of an explanation (or justification) was to claim that
“[t]he mere fact that any given thing can simply be reproduced [and] one need only think of the stupefaction of the Black boy seeing two identical books for the first time”.
Was Baudrillard a Linguistic Idealist?
“I am not sure that we have now transcended and left behind modernity, class politics, labour and production, imperialism, fascism and the other phenomena described by classical and neo-Marxism.”
— Critical theorist and Marxist Douglas Kellner, as found in his book Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond
One term for Baudrillard’s philosophy is linguistic idealism. Of course, it’s not a perfect term. However, take this statement:
“[L]abour is not a *power*, it has become one *sign* amongst many.”
Elsewhere, Baudrillard stated that
“beyond the dialectics of industry, trade and finance, beyond the dialectics of class which is held in its ‘productive’ phase — a symbolic violence inscribed everywhere in signs, even in the signs of the revolution”.
Of course there are “symbols” and “signs”. And some of these symbols and signs refer to industry, trade, finance and class. But how are these concrete things factored out by Baudrillard’s analysis? How do these symbols and signs become “autonomous”? How does reference literally drop out of the picture? How and when did “the real” becomes the “hyperreal”?
As for “labour is not a power, it has become one sign amongst many.” Here Baudrillard’s binarism reveals itself again: why can’t labour be power and be a sign (of whatever) at the same time? Why such categorical claims from Baudrillard?
In terms of Baudrillard’s stress on signs, he noted that Marx was “still in the golden age of the dialectic of the sign and the real”. This is odd because Marx himself stressed the difference between superstructure and substructure. However, this would have been problematic to Baudrillard because to Marx the substructure would have been “the real”, and the superstructure would be (a kind of?) “appearance”. Thus, Baudrillard simply inverted the order by saying that superstructure is now the real. In other words, what Marx took to be epiphenomena (religion, ideology, art, the media, etc.), Baudrillard deemed to be the real…
Except, of course, Baudrillard never really said that the superstructure is the real or anything like that. Indeed, if he had done so, then he would have shown his readers that he was playing the same old game.
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