Baudrillard’s
Successful Assault on Sociology1
John
Armitage2
(Professor
of Media and Communication, Northumbria University, UK).
"He
who knows how to breathe the air of my writings knows that it is an air of the
heights, a robust air". So wrote German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Similarly,
one has to be suited to the atmosphere of the writings of Jean Baudrillard, the
radical French sociologist and intellectual successor to Nietzsche, who died
last week. If one can "breathe his air", one can gain remarkable
insights in Baudrillard’s work on postmodernity and hyperreality, social and
media theories and, indeed, on Nietzsche himself.
Or
else, as many modern sociologists have discovered when faced with his major
works such as Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), Simulacra and
Simulations (1981) and, most recently, The Intelligence of Evil Or The
Lucidity Pact (2005), there is serious danger of an apoplectic reaction.3
Baudrillard is notorious for his trenchant political critiques of the writings
of Michel Foucault on power and the feminist activities of the late Susan
Sontag. Likewise, his development of the concepts of simulation and
hyperreality and his remarks on the mass media world of The Matrix, on
technology and postmodern science have been subjected to rigorous analysis and
debate. Most infamous of all, perhaps, was his observation that the Persian
Gulf War did not take place.
Yet
I would argue that it was his assault on modern sociology that really hits the
mark and where, in fact, he had a singular and sometimes terrifying capacity to
disturb its supposedly tranquil waters. For Baudrillard, the outsider, managed
to expose everything from Marxist sociology and the near-pointlessness of
political engagement to the foundations of contemporary social thought. How
liberally one breathes the air when encouraged by him to confront the
disappointments of the postmodern social system, depends upon how one responds
to his sometimes-difficult works. Postmodern sociology, as Baudrillard
appreciated and lived it, was a constant deliberation undertaken through the
writing of highly provocative and stylized texts that are frequently rejected
tout-court by the high priests of modern social theory.
Baudrillard
was a seeker after all things extraordinary who questioned the utilitarian
foundation of both Adam Smith’s classical and Karl Marx’s radical social and
economic thought by concentrating on the life and nature of commodities – the
object – in contemporary consumer society. Any consideration of consumption had
previously been expelled by contemporary Smithian and Marxist sociology
obsessed with production and accumulation. From the understanding provided by
his long, itinerant meanderings in the more or less prohibited social theory of
Georges Bataille, Baudrillard learnt to observe the starting point of the
economic and the object from a perspective very different from that of modern
sociology.
In
fact, what Baudrillard revived and expanded was the covert history of
Bataille’s notion of “expenditure", a radical theory that saw as deficient
the writings of Smith and Marx, those sociological grandees associated with the
introduction of concepts such as use value and exchange value. However, the
reality of his insights were too much for modern sociology to swallow,
particularly when he argued that in the postmodern society people are
increasingly exchanging visual signs with one another. Value is no longer tied
to an object’s use value or exchange value, but instead to its sign value. Baudrillard
demonstrated his true strength through his argument that the machinery of
conspicuous consumption continues to be affected by symbolic values. These
became for him increasingly the real gauge of social values because symbolic
values are fundamentally linked to pre-capitalist forms of organization that
contemporary society likes to pretend that it has transcended.
For
Baudrillard, the failure of modern sociology was not necessarily its faith in
its ideal type, the perfect society or even its blindness concerning symbolic
exchange. Rather, its breakdown was and is its powerlessness in the face of the
demise of both semiotics and the material world. In other words, each
significant move in Baudrillard’s writings, indeed, every stride he made away
from semiotics and materialism and towards an understanding of the symbolic
order was a kind of resistance to our sign-dominated contemporary society. Yet
he did not automatically contest postmodern social principles. Instead, he was
prepared to challenge their symbolic presence and characteristics, to set his
analytical sights on the forbidden features of enchantment and seduction,
brutality and abrupt reversibility that lie at the core of contemporary
consumption and expenditure. In this sense, Baudrillard’s postmodern sociology
continues to provide a much-needed critique of semiotic society. For what had
been outlawed more or less in principle up until his arrival on the modern
sociological scene was the fact that the age of restricted production and
accumulation was over and that the era of limitless consumption and expenditure
had begun.
©
John Armitage
Endnotes
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