Jean Baudrillard - For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign

Jean Baudrillard

Translated with an Introduction
by Charles Levin

This edition first published by Verso 2019

First published by Telos Press 1981

Translation Charles Levin 1981, 2019

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The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-483-7

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I

The essays in this volume span a period, the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Jean Baudrillard was preparing three other books for publication. In the first, Systme des objets (1968), he took literally and developed at length Lukacs observation, at the beginning of his famous essay on reification, that the problem of commodities [is] the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects. For Baudrillard, as for his predecessor, this meant that the commodity was not just a problem in economics, but the nucleus of a semantic crisis which reticulated throughout the entire social system.

Lukacs had gone on to say that only in this case can the structure of commodity-relations be made to yield a model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them. Here, he elaborated on the conclusion of his previous book that consumption has become a kind of labor, an active manipulation of signs, a sort of bricolage in which the individual desperately attempts to organize his privatized existence and invest it with meaning. But the consumer proceeds through this strange world metonymically, as it were. What is consumed is not the object itself, but the system of objects, the idea of a relation that is actually no longer lived, but abolished, abstracted and consumed by the signifying system itself, of which the commodity is only one kind of differential term. It is this very condition of semiosis, engendered by the universalization of commodity relations, which privatizes experience in the first place. As we consume the code, in effect, we reproduce the system.

Thus, the alleged consumer society surrounds itself with signs of abundance, but abolishes wealth itself, annihilates the experience of abundance, by aborting the concrete, relational dialectic of social interchange through which real abundance comes into existence, and wealth can be lived. Here, Baudrillard takes issue with Sartre. Scarcity is not an objective, quantifiable condition against which lives are acted out in struggle, against which societies erect greater and more (or less) humane barriers. Rather it is this competition, the struggle with necessity itself (a gross ideological form), and the mythic odyssey of growth with which society exorcises this demon, that actually produce scarcity as the very principle of social structure.

In 1972, the essays which appear in this volume were published as Pour une critique de lconomie politique du signe. Many of them condense what is elaborated in the earlier books, but rough sketches of the themes which will preoccupy the later works emerge as the sequence progresses.

I have chosen to append the word notes to the original title and to extend occasionally these introductory remarks to other works and writers subtending Baudrillards discourse.

II

The once supposedly autonomous subject [is] emptied of any content, until it finally becomes a mere name with nothing to denominate. The total transformation of each and every realm of being into a field of means leads to the liquidation of the subject who is supposed to use them. This gives modern industrialist society its nihilistic aspect.

Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason

There is no revolutionary substance inhering in people and things, fermenting liberty and peace, as subject and object, reason and nature traverse the battlegrounds and no mans lands of history. There are no transcendental guarantees, as Marcuse once said; there is no exogenous dialectic. It has always been very tempting to stop right there, abjuring this religion without actually giving up the ghost, without abandoning the originalindeed the sourceof all transcendental guarantees. The revolution, after all, must go on, and if it wont by itself, then I, we, must make it go on. As Marcuse asked. Are you ready to take yourself as an autonomous subject, through your own revolutionary choice, independently of any historical mission, independently of all transcendental guarantees which, between you and me, are a lot of rubbish anyway, one of the luxuries dear Marx used to allow himself?

And, so we have the autonomous subject, making free choices, independently. This is an indispensable idea, so fundamental that if we do away with it completely, we explode any recognizable version of emancipation, as Habermas calls itnot to mention revolutionand implicitly, we abandon the possibility of critical theory.

A frequent problem with this notion of an autonomous subject has been that, of the many who have written in its name, not a few have written as if it were their nom de plume. Perhaps this fact explains, in part, the tyranny wrought, directly (or indirectly, through his epigones), by Marx himself. But Fichtean or Hegelian hubris is not the inevitable consequence of belief in a free and vigorous and creative subjectivity. Sartre did much to publicize the idea that nobody, neither the proletariat nor even he, in spite of his stature, could totalize the entire totality. Marcuse linked the idea of autonomy with a non-aggressive sensibility, rooting freedom in the negation of the split with nature, an explosion of vital needs, as he called it, which transcends the inculcated needs of neo-capitalism.

But if the needs of a radical sensibility are intended to recall a harmonious understanding of nature as subjectivity, they nevertheless take the form of categorical imperatives issuing from an imperious reason. As Marcuse himself insisted: The primary liberation cannot be spontaneous because such spontaneity would only express the values and goals derived from the established system. Self-liberation is self-education but as such it presupposes education by others Those who are educated have a commitment to use their knowledge to help men and women realize and enjoy their truly human capabilities. Now, perhaps this explains the need for critical theory (or perhaps it doesnt); but it certainly casts the entire project into the whirl of an intolerable circleone which is hardly resolved with appeals to the Second Thesis on Feuerbach. It is an intolerable circle not because it is a vicious circle, but because it is growing tiresome, and cannot be sustained indefinitely merely by being dubbed epistemological.