Baudrillard's published work emerged as part of a generation of French thinkers including
Gilles Deleuze,
Jean-François Lyotard,
Michel Foucault,
Jacques Derrida, and
Jacques Lacan who all shared an interest in
semiotics, and he is often seen as a part of the
post-structuralist philosophical school. James M. Russell in 2015 stated that "In common with many post-structuralists, his arguments consistently draw upon the notion that signification and meaning are both only understandable in terms of how particular words or 'signs' interrelate". Baudrillard thought, as do many post-structuralists, that meaning is brought about through
systems of signs working together. Following on from the
structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Baudrillard argued that meaning (
value) is created through
difference—through what something is not (so "dog" means "dog" because it is not-"cat", not-"goat", not-"tree", etc.). In fact, he viewed meaning as near enough
self-referential: objects, images of objects, words and signs are situated in a web of meaning; one object's meaning is only understandable through its relation to the system of other objects; for instance, one thing's prestige relates to another's mundanity. From this starting point Baudrillard theorized broadly about human society based upon this kind of self-referentiality. His writing portrays societies always searching for a sense of meaning—or a "total" understanding of the world—that remains consistently elusive. Baudrillard developed theories in which the excessive, fruitless search for total knowledge leads almost inevitably to a kind of delusion. In Baudrillard's view, the (human) subject may try to understand the (non-human) object, but because the object can only be understood according to what it signifies (and because the process of signification immediately involves a web of other signs from which it is distinguished) this never produces the desired results. The subject is, rather,
seduced (in the original Latin sense: ) by the object. He argued therefore that, in the final analysis, a complete understanding of the minutiae of human life is impossible, and when people are seduced into thinking otherwise they become drawn toward a "
simulated" version of reality, or, to use one of his
neologisms, a state of "
hyperreality". This is not to say that the world becomes unreal, but rather that the faster and more comprehensively societies begin to bring reality together into one supposedly coherent picture, the more insecure and unstable it looks and the more fearful societies become. Reality, in this sense, "dies out". Russell states that Baudrillard argues that "in our present 'global' society, technological communication has created an excessive proliferation of meaning. Because of this, meaning's self-referentiality has prompted, not a 'global village', but a world where meaning has been obliterated" acts such as, for example, terrorism. In Baudrillard's work the symbolic realm (which he develops a perspective on through the
anthropological work of
Marcel Mauss and
Georges Bataille) is seen as quite distinct from that of signs and signification. Signs can be exchanged like commodities; symbols, on the other hand, operate quite differently: they are exchanged, like gifts, sometimes violently as a form of
potlatch. Baudrillard, particularly in his later work, saw the "global" society as without this "symbolic" element, and therefore symbolically (if not militarily) defenseless against acts such as the
Rushdie Fatwa or, indeed, the
September 11 terrorist attacks against the United States and its military and economic establishment.
Value criticism '' In his early books, such as
The System of Objects,
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, and '''', Baudrillard's main focus is upon consumerism, and how different objects are consumed in different ways. At this time Baudrillard's political outlook was loosely associated with
Marxism (and
Situationism), but in these books he differed from
Karl Marx in one significant way. For Baudrillard, as for the situationists, it was consumption rather than production that was the main driver of
capitalist society. Baudrillard came to this conclusion by criticising Marx's concept of "
use-value". Baudrillard thought that both Marx's and
Adam Smith's economic thought accepted the idea of genuine needs relating to genuine uses too easily and too simply. Baudrillard argued, drawing from
Georges Bataille, that needs are constructed, rather than innate. He stressed that all purchases, because they always signify something
socially, have their fetishistic side. Objects always, drawing from
Roland Barthes, "say something" about their users. And this was, for him, why consumption was and remains more important than production: because the "ideological genesis of needs" precedes the production of goods to meet those needs. • The
functional value: an object's instrumental purpose (use value). Example: a pen writes; a refrigerator cools. • The
exchange value: an object's economic value. Example: One pen may be worth three pencils, while one refrigerator may be worth the salary earned by three months of work. • The symbolic value: an object's value assigned by a subject
in relation to another subject (i.e., between a giver and receiver). Example: a pen might symbolize a student's school graduation gift or a commencement speaker's gift; or a diamond may be a symbol of publicly declared marital love. • The
sign value: an object's value within a
system of objects. Example: a particular pen may, while having no added functional benefit, signify prestige relative to another pen; a diamond ring may have no function at all, but may suggest particular social values, such as taste or class. Baudrillard's earlier books were attempts to argue that the first two of these values are not simply associated, but are disrupted by the third and, particularly, the fourth. Later, Baudrillard rejected Marxism totally (
The Mirror of Production and
Symbolic Exchange and Death). But the focus on the difference between sign value (which relates to commodity exchange) and symbolic value (which relates to
Maussian gift exchange) remained in his work up until his death. Indeed, it came to play a more and more important role, particularly in his writings on world events.
Simulacra and Simulation As Baudrillard developed his work throughout the 1980s, he moved from economic theory to mediation and
mass communication. Although retaining his interest in
Saussurean semiotics and the logic of symbolic exchange (as influenced by anthropologist
Marcel Mauss), Baudrillard turned his attention to the work of
Marshall McLuhan, developing ideas about how the nature of social relations is determined by the forms of communication that a society employs. In so doing, Baudrillard progressed beyond both Saussure's and
Roland Barthes's formal semiology to consider the implications of a historically understood version of structural semiology. According to Kornelije Kvas, "Baudrillard rejects the structuralist principle of the equivalence of different forms of linguistic organization, the binary principle that contains oppositions such as: true-false, real-unreal, center-periphery. He denies any possibility of a (mimetic) duplication of reality; reality mediated through language becomes a game of signs. In his theoretical system all distinctions between the real and the fictional, between a copy and the original, disappear". Simulation, Baudrillard claims, is the current stage of the simulacrum: all is composed of references with no referents, a
hyperreality. Baudrillard argues that this is part of a historical progression. In the Renaissance, the dominant simulacrum was in the form of the counterfeit, where people or objects appear to stand for a real referent that does not exist (for instance, royalty, nobility, holiness, etc.). With the
Industrial Revolution, the dominant simulacrum becomes the product, which can be propagated on an endless production line. In current times, the dominant simulacrum is the model, which by its nature already stands for endless reproducibility, and is itself already reproduced.
The end of history and meaning Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, one of Baudrillard's most common themes was
historicity, or, more specifically, how present-day societies use the notions of progress and modernity in their political choices. He argued, much like the political theorist
Francis Fukuyama, that history had ended or "vanished" with the spread of
globalization; but, unlike Fukuyama, Baudrillard averred that this end should not be understood as the culmination of history's progress,{{blockquote|The aim of this world order [...] is, in a sense, the
end of history, not on the basis of a democratic fulfillment, as Fukuyama has it, but on the basis of preventive terror, of a counter-terror that puts an end to any possible
events. Within a society subject to and ruled by fast-paced electronic communication and global information networks the collapse of this façade was always going to be, he thought, inevitable. Employing a quasi-scientific vocabulary that
attracted the ire of the physicist
Alan Sokal, Baudrillard wrote that the speed society moved at had destabilized the linearity of history: "we have the
particle accelerator that has smashed the referential orbit of things once and for all." This involves the notion of "
escape velocity" as outlined in
The Illusion of the End, which in turn, results in the postmodern
fallacy of escape velocity on which the postmodern mind and critical view cannot, by definition, ever truly break free from the all-encompassing "
self-referential" sphere of discourse. == Political commentary ==