Baudrillard and Signs

Signification Ablaze

Gary Genosko

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415112574
• eBook ISBN: 9781134831142
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book relates Baudrillard's work to contemporary social r4248y. The author traces the connections between Baudrillard's work and Marx and Marxism; Lefebvre and structuralist method; the works of Saussure, Bataille, Barthes, Foucault, Mauss, Peirce, McLuhan and the Prague School. The result is an authoritative and stimulating account of Baudrillard and modern social theory.

Chapter 1
Bar games

‘What gives you a hard on [vous fait bander], theoreticians…is the coldness of the clear and distinct’, Jean-François Lyotard has provocatively written (Lyotard, 1975: 115). Lyotard describes the erection of a disjunctive bar whose function is to draw and to maintain critical distinctions. This bar at once invokes a dis- and a con-junction, Lyotard thinks, ‘since in order to demarcate this side from that, one must be on both sides’. One must work the bar from both sides, the two sides (at least) which hold it up.

Such bawdy talk, in drawing attention to itself, to its monophallo-erotism, has given rise to a power play at which Jane Gallop has pointed with reference to Jacques Lacan’s placement of the signifier over the signified, the former thus exercising power over the latter (avoir sur barre) (Gallop, 1985: 120). It is, however, the bar which will concern me here because it is powerful, a power bar, as Baudrillard has described it in L’Echange symbolique (1976: 201): ‘When one says that power tient la barre, this is not a metaphor: it is this bar between life and death, this decree which interrupts the exchange of life and death, this tollgate and this control between the two banks’. The bar represses death. It is invested with the social power to do so; tenir la barre means to take control, to take the helm. The power bar between life and death is the archetype, Baudrillard maintains, of all the disjunctions which constitute the code. Life and death are reunited when there is no bar whose power lies in its ability to block an ineluctable relation in which there is an incessant obligation to give, to receive and to return, and thus to enter into a symbolic communion. Baudrillard too will work both sides of the bar. But this is not his only bar. In fact, Baudrillard will work a number of them.

A certain bar will at first prove to be too weak to differentiate the domain of value from the field of non-value; this bar of implication (la barre d’implication logique formelle), that is to say, will not suffice. Therefore, Baudrillard will require a second, more solid bar of radical exclusion (la barre d’exclusion radicale). Even so, Baudrillard will need to straddle this strong bar so that he may develop critically and theoretically the concepts which it separates. The strong bar is not the power bar, although it is powerful. The strong bar is not an archetype. I am a little further along the bar at ‘Archie’s Place’ than Paul de Man was when he joked about archie debunker’s bowling shoes.

The bar games which Baudrillard plays in his essay ‘Pour une théorie générale’ in Pour une critique cannot contribute to a general theory since there is, he admits, ‘no organizing theory’ behind them. But the use of pour marks general theory as a destination, and also indicates that the central issues through which one moves are exchange and equivalence. There is, despite Baudrillard’s protests, a general theory of symbolic exchange supported by anti-semiological bar games in his work. The bar in question is the one in semiological and structural analysis which holds basic concepts and relations together and keeps them apart (i.e. the bar between the signifier and the signified, and the slanted bar between this/that). One plays a game with the bar in order to reconfigure the sign and reshape structural relations. The goal of the game is, in general, to destroy the sign, and to pass through ‘structure’ into a more radical realm. But the important point is that one gets into the game— just as one ultimately puts an end to the game—by hanging around the bar.

‘Pour une théorie générale’ has been largely ignored by readers of Baudrillard save Jean-Claude Giradin (1974). Giradin responds favourably to Baudrillard’s homology between the commodity and the sign and proposes a further homological relation between labour and the signifier and wages and the signified, a relation which, he believes, completes Baudrillard’s formulation but in a less abstract way. Although Mark Poster includes this short chapter in his Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings (Baudrillard, 1988a), he mentions only in passing the ‘systematicness’ of the essays as a whole in Pour une critique. Even those critics such as Poster (1981) and Robert D’Amico (1981) who have analyzed with some care Baudrillard’s homology between the sign and the commodity share the dual goals of revealing his misunderstandings of Marx’s critique of political economy and discrediting semiology. Within this approach to Baudrillard, the charges of semiotic objectivism, idealism, and even fetishism predictably levelled at Baudrillard unfortunately dissuade one from an analysis of his stormy encounters with semiology and structuralism (Kellner, 1989). The refrain that Baudrillard has a ‘critical semiology’ has not entailed the investigation of the pseudo-algebraic formulations of ‘Pour une théorie générale’, which are classically structuralist in the sense that they demonstrate formal similarities or homologous relations among different key concepts in the domain of value, and explicitly semiological in that they reveal the combinatorial principles which govern this domain as a code. Bar games are central operators in Baudrillard’s project. Baudrillard’s structuralist and semiological operations articulate the tradition in which he works, while his bar games demonstrate his struggle to free himself from it. Gane (1991: 83–5) devotes several pages to what he calls Baudrillard’s ‘programme of 1972’ and perspicaciously isolates a dilemma in his thinking. The radical bar of exclusion commits Baudrillard to, as Gane puts it, ‘an unbridgeable gap between exchange value and symbolic exchange’, even though certain practices (i.e. sharing wine) may involve ‘a complex interweaving of symbolic exchange and sign consumption’ (Gane, 1991: 84). But Baudrillard’s commitment to the externality of symbolic exchange does not permit this interweaving, Gane laments, and it requires him to elaborate a theory of the symbolic and to join in the widespread poststructuralist critique of the sign, about which Gane says little. Indeed, the concept of interweaving substitutes Baudrillardian ambivalence for ambiguity and invests symbolic obligation and circulation with the consumption of differences (the range of 1989 Bordeaux). Conviviality is no substitute for agonistic relations.

Pour une critique, Baudrillard’s third book, continued his earlier structural analyses of the system of object-signs and the ideological genesis of needs in consumer society, but with a critical turn towards his methods of analysis. Its eleven essays contain key hypotheses on the limits of structuralist method and the metaphysical faults of Marxian political economy, semiology and communication theory. It will be instructive, for my purposes, to review the text as a whole before concentrating on what I call Baudrillard’s ‘table of conversions’.

Pour une critique is Baudrillard’s most systematic book to date because it moves toward a general theory summarized in a table of conversions between Marxian political economy and semiology. Guided by his elaboration of the homological structuration of the commodity and the sign, whose mutation into an ‘object form’ means ultimately that both are ‘abolished as specific determinations’ in what he calls semiurgic society, the table formalizes conversions and reconversions among four logics of value; each logic has its own operational principle, its own specific determinations, and assumes different forms. The table is interpreted in three clusters: production/consumption, transfiguration and, most importantly, transgression.

The first cluster expresses the mutual dependence of the processes of production and consumption in classical and Marxist political economy. The second group entails the systematic identity of material and sign production in virtue of Baudrillard’s equation of the commodity and the sign (the structural relation of implication between economic exchange value over use value equals that of the signifier over the signified, hence economic exchange is to the signifier as use value is to the signified). The determinations and principles of use value and economic exchange value are redefined by the coded differential positions and rules of combination by which object-signs are manipulated for different kinds of profit (social, aesthetic, etc.). The conversions of transgression indicate the passage from the domain of economic and semiological value to the symbolic, while the reconversions describe the reductive revaluing of symbolic exchange through its reinstrumentalization as a commodity or a sign.

Baudrillard includes symbolic exchange among the other theories of value in order to define general political economy, although it stands ‘beyond’ all value. Symbolic exchange is virulently anti-semiological and in the wake of its violent ‘effraction’ (break and entry) into the sanctuary of value by means of revolutionary consumptive practices, ‘signs must burn’. Baudrillard analyzes the ideological process which defines the contemporary social order in terms of the ‘semiological reduction’ of symbolic relations based upon a transparent, concrete, agonistic, ambivalent and obligatory pact between persons sealed by an absolutely singular symbol (a wedding ring and other ritual objects). When the symbol is reified as a sign whose value emanates from the system, its ambivalence becomes structural equivalence, rendering social relations of production and consumption abstract and opaque. The symbolic is Baudrillard’s revolutionary anthropological antidote to the political economy of the sign, and it challenges signs from the perspective of what they attempt to expel and annihilate.

Central to Baudrillard’s critique is his insight into structural form revealed through the homology between the commodity and the sign. Exchange value and the signifier have a ‘strategic value’ greater than the ‘tactical value’ of use value and the signified. Binary oppositive structuration is never symmetrical since each antecedent term produces its own ‘alibi’ as its consequent term. Use value and the signified are ‘effects’ or ‘simulation models’ of their antecedent terms. They are produced respectively by Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism in terms of exchange value alone, while semio-linguistics privileges the signifier as its principle of circulation and regulated interplay. If for Marx use values were incomparable and thus not implicated in the abstract logic of equivalence of exchange value, for Baudrillard they have a specific code of their own, especially in relation to symbols. Similarly, Baudrillard’s signified-referent lacks the metaphysical status and autonomy afforded to it in the tripartite division of signifier-signified-referent, precisely because it does not exist beyond the shadow of signification.

Baudrillard theorizes that the exclusion of the referent in Saussure’s separation of the sign (signifier-signified) from the world entails a ‘metaphysical representation of the referent’. Baudrillard demonstrates this by criticizing Emile Benveniste’s relocation of the arbitrariness of the signifier-signified relation between that of the sign (signifier-signified) and the referent. This relocation is possible only by reviving the sign’s initial separation from the referent and by repairing it with what Baudrillard calls the ‘supernatural’ provision of motivation (it matters little whether motivation is affirmed or denied). Motivation parallels the concept of need in political economy. Need is a function of the capitalist system, just as motivation is a function of the sign system.

Baudrillard then applies his critique to the Left’s faith in revolutionary praxis to effect a critical reversal of the media by liberating its ‘fundamentally egalitarian’ nature perverted by capitalism. The Left fails to analyze the ‘ideological matrix that communication theory embraces’ and thus accepts uncritically a theory which simulates a genuine exchange based on personal and mutual responsibility. He further demonstrates these shortcomings by focusing on Roman Jakobson’s model of communication.

Baudrillard hypothesizes that agency has passed into the code which terrorizes communication by positioning the sender and receiver in an ‘abstract separateness’ and privileging the sender. Jakobson’s phatic function in his model of communication, for instance, is evidence for Baudrillard of the distance between the poles and a critical fiction akin to motivation. Jakobson’s model reproduces social relations based upon the power of the media to give what cannot be returned except by the simulacral detour of a response (a poll or referendum). Under the guise of admitting ambiguity and even polyvocality, the model excludes an ambivalent exchange between persons. Baudrillard claims that it is the code which speaks since it dictates the unidirectional passage of information and guarantees the legibility and univocality of the message. The model is therefore ideological rather than scientific and objective. I will return in detail to these themes in the following chapters.

THE TABLE OF CONVERSIONS

The ‘general conversion table’ of all values which unfolds in Baudrillard’s essay is a ‘combinatory exploration’ rather than a rigorous arrangement of equivalent values. By the same token, Baudrillard plays on the idea of a conversion table such as weights and measures in which British, American and metric equivalents are given together with the conversion factors and formulae; the table in addition suggests a translation-conversion in computer technology from one code/language to another. The codes in question consist of terms from Marxian political economy and semiology. What is ironic is that this so-called conversion table will also be used to express the limits of convertibility at the horizon of a generalized structural law of value, beyond which lies symbolic exchange. The table of conversions is itself inconvertible. The components of Baudrillard’s computation towards a general theory may be expressed in the Table 1, consisting of four columns.

Table 1 Logics of value

The horizontal dash is a mark of the transit from one domain to another, as Baudrillard explains (1972: 145). For each of the antecedent terms in the twelve correlations, transit to the consequent term takes the form of a conversion, the reconversion of which is not accomplished along the same line but rather, takes place with respect to a correlation which presents the same terms flanking another dash of transit in reverse order under a different logic. This dash is straight, and thus goes only one way at a given time. The proliferation of dashes and correlations is necessary in order to illustrate the multiple transits between the logics.

The table consists of three clusters of conversions/ reconversions:

Each of the four columns of the logics of value has an operative principle (utility, equivalence, difference, ambivalence); each has its own determinations (functional, commercial, structural, psychical); and each takes a different object form (instrument, commodity, sign and symbol). The three clusters, about which Baudrillard says surprisingly little, although his interest comes to be focused on transgression, will be distilled into two areas within a single domain through the homology between political economy and semiology. The fourth column represents the exception to the rules of conversion and reconversion.

The first grouping (C1—R4) expresses the mutual dependency of the processes of production and consumption. The production of consumption (production of EcEV, conversion of UV-EcEV) and the consumption of a commodity which consummates the process of production (reconversion of EcEV-UV in the purchase of a commodity) are the two non-identical moments of the cycle of political economy (Marx, 1973: 90–4). Production is the dominant moment of the cycle and it is unconsumable; consumption is a moment of production and distribution is a product of production.

There is no strict linguistic equivalent for distribution in this conversion. One can imagine, however, that syntagmatic and associative relations are distributive mechanisms. Both the order of succession and familial clustering, with their respective fixed and unfixed numbers of elements, result from the movement of elements in different kinds of relations along the line of syntagms structured oppositionally with one another within language, and from the concatenation of terms according to memory. Moreover, this transit zone of classical and Marxist political economy does not take into account the political economy of the sign. A political economy of the sign presumes to have analyzed the structural logic of the commodity and to have abolished its specificity as a determinant of social relations in the object form. This so-called politica...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES AND TABLES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1 BAR GAMES
• CHAPTER 2 SIMULATION AND SEMIOSIS
• CHAPTER 3 VARIETIES OF SYMBOLIC EXCHANGE
• CHAPTER 4 EMPTY SIGNS AND EXTRAVAGANT OBJECTS
• CONCLUSION
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY