Bad Ass Baudrillard

Ken Rufo says that Baudrillard was his first great theorist love, and it is easy to understand why. Baudrillard did everything a theorist ought to. He read other theorists, was informed by them, contradicted them, developed his own theories, and ignited controversy with his theories. He made people think, and isn't that the point of critical theory, to provide analysis that provokes thought and further analysis on the part of both the reader and the theorist? Rufo provides a history of Baudrillard's work, and in doing so outlines several points that (at least for this reader) spurred contemplation.

First, Rufo explains that Baudrillard began as a Marxist, and through his analysis turned Marxism inside out. Baudrillard began by incorporating sign-value into structural Marxism, and the focus on sign-value meant a focus on consumption rather than production. Rufo's example, Tommy Hillfiger's logo on polo shirts made in sweat shops, illustrates that commodities are completely removed from their production. What is important is that those clothes have the Tommy Hillfiger logo on them, and that people will pay a lot of money for that logo. By focusing on the sign-value of Tommy Hillfiger's logo and the revenue it generates, the production of the clothing is forgotten, it doesn't matter.

Baudrillard later, as Rufo explains, complicated this by positing sign-value as something that enabled the analysis of commodity in the first place. He argues that it is integral to the necessary pre-existing understanding of language for Marxist criticism. This enables the connection to Saussure and semiotics. To justify this relationship, Baudrillard (and Rufo) point to the sign, signifier, and signified, and Marxist commodity. The sign is comprised of the signifier and signified, and the commodity, and it's sign-value, is comprised of use-value and exchange-value. The relationship of the sign-value of the commodity to its use-value and exchange-value, is necessarily arbitrary, like the relationship of the sign to the signifier and signified.

This correlation, Rufo argues, allowed Baudrillard to arrive at the conclusion that systems of analysis are simply new systems of exchange-values. The consequence of this is that theories produce self-fulfilling prophecies. By developing terms to suit analysis, theorists cultivate concepts that justify their theories. This creates a sort of model for critical theory, which Rufo explains as a way of following the analytical formula and utilizing terms and concepts specifically designed to prove the theory in order to validate it. Baudrillard's criticism of other theorists, like Lacan and Foucault, relates to his earliest works on simulation. This model for critical theory enables the construction of artificial meanings that appear to be "real" meanings. In doing so, the theories pretend to find insight, when they actually simulate insight by creating the means with which they find it. Baudrillard's criticism of Psychoanalysis is that it allegedly claims to have discovered the unconscious, but it actually constructs and produces it as a tool in support of Psychoanalysis. Essentially, theory is constantly producing systems that claim to discover when they actually produce. What is important in theory is the insights it is thought to provide, not the process by which they are developed or constructed.

This simulation of meanings in theory is related to Baudrillard's work with simulation and media, and his argument that the media produces an artificial reality as theory creates artificial meanings. The media, especially television according to Baudrillard, creates and copies things which the general population comes to accept as real. Baudrillard outlines the four orders of simulation: the first, in which simulation stands in for reality, the second, in which simulation hides the lack of reality, the third, in which simulation produces its own reality, and the fourth, in which simulation is so pervasive that it is everywhere, encompassing everything and nothing all at once. He revised the third order before introducing the fourth, and it can be understood as the simulacrul stage in which the copy no longer has an original.

In calling the third order of simulation as the simulacral stage, Baudrillard is borrowing the term simulacrum from Plato, effectively reappropriating the term to suit his needs. This perhaps seems contradictory to Baudrillard's criticism of theory itself, as he is producing concepts and terms to validate his own theory. But isn't this contradiction a larger problem in theory? Or is it a point of theory? Each branch of theory has its own contradictions and conflicts, which the subsequent reactionary theories seek to challenge and further complicate. Structuralism argues that language is a stable system of differences, with binary divisions and opposites that never confront one another. Post Structuralism recognizes language as unstable, and argues that the binaries are in constant conflict. New theories arise in opposition to old theories, and are constantly replacing one another as the dominant theory. Baudrillard likely recognized his own contradictions (at least Ken Rufo does), and these contradictions lay the groundwork for reactionary theory.

In his later work, Baudrillard addresses the Impossible Exchange Barrier, which suggests that the world is resistant to attempts of theorizing it. Theories reach a certain point at which they can no longer address the entirety of their opposition without contradiction. In light of his theories of simulation and simulacrum, this may be a good thing according to Rufo, in that this obstacle might thwart the imposition of value-meanings.

Rufo closes his crash course on Baudrillard with the idea that Baudrillard was not trying to rescue the real, but rather rescue illusion, which cannot happen in a world in which everything is "realized." A world where there is no reality other than a simulation that has created its own meaning is precisely where we are today. If everything is a simulation to the point where it becomes reality, then there is no possibility of mystery or illusion, because the simulation and reality are part of a grand illusion, which is a theoretical quarrel. Baudrillard's work, according to Rufo, attempts to reproduce illusion and mystery, and to avoid the traps that plague critical theory.

Right on, Baudrillard.