sarah spangler's List: Baudrillard

• and the impact of new media, information, and cybernetic technologies in the creation of a qualitatively different social order, providing fundamental mutations of human and social life
• In retrospect, Baudrillard can be seen a theorist who has traced in original ways the life of signs and impact of technology on social life, and who has systematically criticized major modes of modern thought, while developing his own philosophical perspectives.
• 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.
• Baudrillard undertook serious work in the field of social theory, semiology, and psychoanalysis in the 1960s and published his first book
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• For Baudrillard, the entire society is organized around consumption and display of commodities through which individuals gain prestige, identity, and standing.
• 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.
• t 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

• 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.
• ollowing 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.

• 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.

    
• 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.

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• The philosophical modernism at issue in postmodernism begins with Kant's “Copernican revolution,” that is, his assumption that we cannot know things in themselves and that objects of knowledge must conform to our faculties of representation (Kant 1964)
• The later nineteenth century is the age of modernity as an achieved reality, where science and technology, including networks of mass communication and transportation, reshape human perceptions.
• A consequence of achieved modernism is what postmodernists might refer to as de-realization. De-realization affects both the subject and the objects of experience, such that their sense of identity, constancy, and substance is upset or dissolved.
• In this sense, society has become a realization of abstract thought, held together by an artificial and all-pervasive medium speaking for everyone and for no one.
• In Marx, on the other hand, we have an analysis of the fetishism of commodities (Marx 1983, 444-461) where objects lose the solidity of their use value and become spectral figures under the aspect of exchange value. Their ghostly nature results from their absorption into a network of social relations, where their values fluctuate independently of their corporeal being. Human subjects themselves experience this de-realization because commodities are products of their labor. Workers paradoxically lose their being in realizing themselves, and this becomes emblematic for those professing a postmodern sensibility.

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