Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard is a post-structuralist philosopher noted for his theories about popular culture. He taught for most of his career in the department of sociology at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris.

His early works, La Système des objets (1968) (The System of Objects, 1996) and La Societe de consommation (1970) deal with the increasing dominance of the media and consumer culture in contemporary society. Here his method combines Marxist analysis with concepts from semiology and psychoanalytic (Freudian) theory. Baudrillard employs a strategy (from structural linguistics) of breaking down linguistic signs into three parts. The table below gives the scheme, and illustrates it with the example of the sign 'Coca Cola' as it is used in contemporary media and advertising.


 * Note: this needs to be checked ^.
 * Source: Poster (1975), p 6; Poster (1998), p 662.

According to Baudrillard's translator, Mark Poster, linguistic structuralists "relegate the signified and the referent to an obscure horizon of their science," concentrating instead on the signifier: the relations between signifiers, the structures they form. They claim to have shown that signifiers are becoming increasingly abstracted from subjects (signifieds) and from the social world of objects (referents). Baudrillard argues that this separation is the essence of capitalist political economy. In Le Miroir de la production (1973) (The Mirror of Production, 1975), he claims that Marx's insight that capitalist political economy creates a separation between the exchange value and the use value of objects is but one instance of this more general separation of signifiers from their signifieds and referents. He claims that Marx was insufficiently radical, having failed to get beyond, or outside, of some of the fundamental assumptions of capitalist political economy. The consequence, says Baudrillard, is that Marx inherits the productivist bias of capitalist political economy, assigning material production a much too prominent theoritical position. In later works, Baudrillard increasingly leaves Marx behind.

Baudrillard sees media culture, and advertising in particular, as constituting a 'code' that has a powerful influence on individuals. To paraphrase Poster, "People consume not so much objects but images, ideals, fantasies, styles – all of which are structured through advertising and presented in the electronic media, a strange new dimension of social life which alters forever the older 'bourgeois' culture of modern society." Baudrillard: The signified and the referent are now abolished to the sole profit of the play of signifiers, of a generalized formalization where the code no longer refers back to any subjective or objective 'reality,' but to its own logic. The signifier becomes its own referent and the use value of the sign disappears only to the profit of its commutation and exchange value. The sign no longer designates anything at all. It approaches in its truth its structural limit which is to refer back to other signs. All reality then becomes the place of a semiological manipulation, of a structural simulation. And whereas the ttraditional sign. . . is the object of a conscious investment, of a rational calculation of signifieds, here it is the code that becomes the instance of absolute reference.

Poster believes that "Baudrillard's critique of the sign allows him to render the situation of advanced capitalism with much more concreteness than traditional Marxism. Whole realms of contemporary protest (Blacks, women, youth, etc.) and critique (consumption, sex, language, the media, etc) can be seen better in relation to the repressiveness of the code than in relation to the mode of production.  The dramatic tension in the system comes from its difficulty in reproducing the code, while production itself becomes merely an ideological support of the system. (It delivers the goods.)"

In his works of the 1980s and 1990s, Baudrillard argued that as people relate more and more through electronic communications (radio, TV, email, computerised social media), a new reality which he calls the 'hyperreal' is created. "The world of face-to-face is becoming the world of the 'interface'." In this connexion, he says that media language increasingly refers not to anything real, but to objects of its own construction – 'similacra' – in an expanding labarynth of self-referentiality. The media presentation is both an original – a new text – and a copy of older texts. The TV news does not really report about something in an 'external' world: it makes important what it states, creating news as it reports about it. This difficult logic, 'Hyperreality', increasingly dominates the exchanges of words and images, gradually forming a new and very strange culture."