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 (Lyceé) 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 Mühlmann. 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 Troisiême Cycle" in sociology at Nanterre in 1966 with a dissertation on "Le système 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
enrageés, 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 began publishing a series of books that would eventually make him world famous. Influenced by Lefebvre, Barthes, and s 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 argued 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 like language organized in a system of meaning. Baudrillard, following Barthes and others, argued that fashion, sports, the media, and other modes of signification also 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 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.
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). Baudrillard 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 where everything is a commodity, 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).
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, Baudrillard 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 Baudrillard a desire to work on the margins, to stand aside from current trends and fads, and to develop his own theoretical positions.
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 Lukàcs (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 Lukàcs, 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, Baudrillard 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.