Baudrillard's Challenge

A Feminist Reading

Victoria Grace

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134678129
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This controversial book is the first systematic feminist reading of the work of Jean Baudrillard, one of the most pivotal figures in contemporary cultural theory, and is essential reading for students of feminist theory, sociology and cultural theory. Drawing on the full range of Baudrillard's writings the author engages in a debate with:

* the work of Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler and Rosi Braidotti on identity, power and desire
* the feminist concern with 'difference' as an emancipatory construct
* writings on transgenderism and the performance of gender
* feminist concerns about the objectification of women.

Through this critical engagement Grace reveals some of the limitations of some contemporary feminist theorising around gender and identity, patriarchy and power, and in so doing offers a way forward for contemporary feminist thought.

1 Ideologies of Meaning and Value

To claim, to argue, that Baudrillard’s work is of central importance to feminist theory, it is necessary to begin with his theoretical analysis of the relationship between the coded structure of value in political economy and the parallel structure of the linguistic sign. In recent years many feminist theorists have created a distinct and powerful trend within feminist thought by avidly appropriating concepts of ‘post’- Saussurian linguistics, advocating ‘post’structuralist approaches to theorising and critique. Feminists have claimed that the poststructuralist critique of language not as a medium that reflects or represents reality, but as an active discourse that constructs social realities and subjectivities, has empowering possibilities for women, for those cast as ‘other’ in a phallocentric, humanist semiology. Such a critique, it is argued, has the potential to demystify meta-narratives of objectivity and truth, to open the field of discourse to a plurality of competing meanings, and to make explicit the politics of knowledge. Challenges to oppressive discursive practices can reconfigure the meanings that characterise and give shape to events, to processes of gendering, to what gets done and why.

In this chapter I argue that consideration of Baudrillard’s critique of the ‘political economy of the sign’ reveals serious problems with feminist endorsement and appropriation of these poststructuralist assumptions, problems which become evident in the work of important contemporary feminist theorists as different as Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler. Baudrillard’s critique of the ‘political economy of the sign’ does not, of course, incite a defence of modernist or structuralist political and epistemological assumptions in the face of a ‘post’structuralist challenge. Rather, it questions assumptions about the nature of meaning which are common to both structuralist and poststructuralist theories. It is these assumptions that Baudrillard analyses and deconstructs. I will argue that, in doing so, he reveals a gendered politics of meaning-making.

In this first chapter I establish an understanding of the key concepts and theoretical arguments in Baudrillard’s early work, concepts and theoretical insights which provide the grounds for his later work. I begin the process of drawing out the implications of this critical work for feminist theory, a process that is subsequently developed throughout the book from a variety of angles. At least since Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex (1949), feminist theorists have been concerned to critique the object status of women, of the feminine, within a binary of subject/ object where subjecthood is masculine. To explore this concern and progress this critique, there has been a primary focus on the way subjectivity is constructed within language, examining how a grammar of gendered positioning is integral to the structure of language. This has led to theoretical considerations of how subjects are created within discourse through the articulation of subject positions as politically invested significations. Feminists ask how the politics of this process that positions ‘women’ as invariably ‘other’, not men, as objects rather than subjects, can be subverted. How can women create a wholly different logic that is not subsumed within a phallocentric order? How is the binary of subject/object constituted and reproduced? What are the structural preconditions of the existence of this binary?

Baudrillard presents a case that the structure of economic value, as this has been constructed (and has changed) over the last few hundred years in the west, parallels, and is related to, the structure of signification. In other words, axiology and semiology have to be understood in terms of how they share a logic, a strategy, and a politics. Further, the very possibility of the construct of subjects and objects, and the relationship between them, has to be understood through an analysis of the social process of instituting economic value in conjunction with the structure of systems of signification. How these are interrelated and why the notion of a linguistic subject and an economic object is so problematic will be the focus of this chapter.

The Constitution of the Economic Object and the Linguistic Subject

Where does the value of an object come from? The so-called ‘science’ of economics and the mythology of economic exchange that constructs our knowledge of objects and their worth would have us believe that an ‘economy’ exists as a natural given in much the same way as societies, tool-making, history, or biological organisms for that matter. Objects with value to human beings are assumed to precede our human, social process of exchange of these objects. The exchange of these objects is called an ‘economic exchange’ and the structure of this exchange is assumed to vary across history and across culture. What is assumed to transcend history and culture, however, is the existence of objects and their exchange between human actors as a calculus of value based, ultimately, on the utility of those objects.

Baudrillard turns this edifice on its head and argues that it represents a pervasive ideological construct that has precisely sustained the progressively hegemonic and totalising economic structure of capitalism. He critiques Marx for making the same fatal assumptions and therefore perpetuating the ideology of a productivist logic of accumulation and growth to infinity (and certain end!). Rather than assuming objects exist and have value prior to the social institution of mechanisms of economic exchange, Baudrillard argues that objects are constituted as objects by virtue of the construct of value that precedes them. This critique is at the heart of his work, and given the significance to feminism of the concern regarding women’s situatedness within a problematic subject/object dichotomy, it is important to examine the basis of this claim and to consider its implications.

The object as an object of economic exchange has an ontological status that is assumed to exist prior to, and in ontological terms independent of, systems of economic exchange. As such, the object has a singular and unchanging phenomenal being. If it changes, it is transformed from one object to another (a pile of ash is no longer a wooden chair). What Baudrillard points to is the way the construction of this status of the object cannot be understood independently from the representational system that establishes the meaning of objects. The mode of signification is inseparable from this process of constructing the status of objects. The key insight Baudrillard proposes is that both the signifying practice that institutes a linguistic subject and the ontological assumption that constructs objects as objects of economic exchange are structured according to a coded form; a code or logic that is the structural imperative constituting objects in the world and subjects who enter into (economic) exchanges of objects.

The coded form constructing the object of economic exchange assumes that exchange value is predicated on a prior use value. In other words, the question of where the value comes from in economic exchange (when money changes hands) is resolved through recourse to the assumption of a natural and given use value: the utility of the object to the ‘individual’ (for the logic of utility to work there has to be an individual whose psychology accords with the logic of interest to maximise his or her ‘utility’: ‘use’ of objects; an individual subject of economic exchange). Use value and the logic of utility are predicated in turn on the assumed inalienable status of human ‘needs’. A loaf of bread, considered as basic staple food, is assumed to have ‘use value’ for someone who is hungry and thus deemed to ‘need’ it, and prepared to buy it at a given price corresponding to its ‘exchange value’. (I elaborate on the significance of this assumption of ‘needs’, and Baudrillard’s critique, below.)

So what exactly is the code? The code instantiates this process whereby, relying on the dichotomous separation of exchange value from use value, a logic of equivalence structures the scale of value which is then necessary to establish the relationship between exchange value and use value. For example, it is necessary to establish the relative ‘exchange value’ of a loaf of packaged bread and a jar of instant coffee, by recourse to a scale where three of this can be said to be worth one of that. Economics mythically postulates that this relationship is derived from the use value, or utility, consumers place on these goods. Baudrillard argues that this structure is paralleled by the positing of a subject as dichotomously separate from an object, which implies one then has to institute the concept of ‘need’ to establish the subject/object relation. Economics, of course, assumes that ‘need’ comes prior,and this assumption serves to postulate the natural status of the subject/object relation. The code, therefore, is the structural, dichotomous split, the bar that simultaneously separates and constitutes its terms as present/absent, identity/ difference, 1/0.¹

Poststructuralist linguistic theories, as these have been appropriated by feminists, critique the notion of the fixity of meaning, and rather assume that meaning is fluid, plural, and multiple (see Weedon 1987). This leads to the question of how this apparent plurality and multiplicity could be conceptualised by Baudrillard as coded. Saussure’s structuralist theory of linguistics, for all its confusions and contradictions, has been interpreted as claiming, in simple terms, that meaning does not inhere in the object world, but is created within language. Vicki Kirby (1997) is an example of an author who, from a feminist perspective, engages Saussure’s writings with careful scrutiny to reveal the problematics of such a rigid distinction of language and object world, claiming that Saussure’s work is actually traversed by the tensions produced by such a rigid formulation. Generally, however, it is understood that the central thesis of Saussure’s theory of linguistics is that language is made up of signs which form a system of meaning by virtue of a dichotomous structure of identity/difference (or same as, different from) distinguishing signs from each other and simultaneously establishing their ‘identity’. Accordingly, a sign as a unit of meaning comprises a signifier (an acoustic sound or visual mark completely devoid of meaning) and a signified (a concept or meaning associated with that signifier). The signifier (Sr) and the signified (Sd) are a dichotomous binary, but according to Saussure, they are like two sides of a sheet of paper whereby the Sr conjures the Sd in an inevitable fashion, although their relationship is deemed to be arbitrary. This structure parallels that described above with respect to the dichotomous separating of exchange value and use value, and then the establishing of their relationship through a logic of equivalence. Similarly here, the dichotomous separation of the Sr and the Sd (Sr/Sd) presents the problem of their relationship, which is then resolved by establishing their equivalence.

This observation has to be followed quickly by the concern that the poststructuralist critique of the fixed nature of the relationship between Saussure’s Sr and Sd renders this notion of a relationship of equivalence simply wrong; according to the poststructuralist critique the meaning (Sd) associated with any signifier is continually deferred, and is never fixed. Further, there is a multiplicity of possible Sds that might be ‘read’ from a Sr, and it is precisely this plurality of possible meanings of signs that makes the active use of language so political, as meanings are continually contested. Baudrillard argues, however, that this critique simply shifts the code from one of equivalence to one of polyvalence and leaves the fundamental structure intact. The fundamental structure is the dichotomous separation of the Sr and the Sd, and the codified nature of the construction of meaning according to a polyvalent logic of identity/difference (identities/ differences). The structural assumptions about the construction of the meaning of ‘objects’ remain the same whether our meaning is assumed to be the same as, or different from, that of ‘others’; assumed to be fixed or floating and fluid. Equivalent or polyvalent, meaning is still ‘valent’, that is, has the propensity to register a positive identity on a single scale of value; whether this is a single point or multiple points is irrelevant. It remains within a binary construct of identity/difference, Sr/ Sd.²

Baudrillard argues that Saussurian linguistics created a semiology with an ideological force of the same magnitude as that of political economy.³It could perhaps be said, following Baudrillard’s argument, that the ‘post’structuralist critique of Saussure is of the order of Marx’s critique of political economy. As Marx’s critique leaves the assumptions of use value and the ideology of needs intact (and in fact more firmly reconstitutes them), similarly the poststructuralist critique leaves the assumption of the dichotomy of Sr/Sd intact, which reinscribes the codified logic of meaning.

From this brief introduction it is possible to see how Baudrillard focuses on the structural interweaving of political economy and signification. He insists that the critique of the system of political economy has also to be a critique of the political economy of the sign.⁴ Before considering his analysis and critique of this system, it is probably useful to give some consideration to what exactly is problematic about the code by introducing the concept of ‘symbolic exchange’, which Baudrillard counterpoints to economic exchange.

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary definition of ‘code’ is wonderfully ambiguous and ironic when considered in the light of the current discussion: ‘set of rules on any subject’ (my emphasis); a set of rules, a code that predetermines the form of the subject (here linguistic subject as well as ‘topic’). The very possibility of economic exchange, Baudrillard argues, is predicated on the existence of such a code: a rule that structures the relationship between objects and the relationship of objects to subjects on a scale creating differential positions that identify the object. The object must exist as an autonomous entity that can be so positioned; simultaneously, the subject must exist as an autonomous agent whose need or desire constitutes the benchmark for the utility of the object, providing the basis for its value.

This dichotomous structure of subject/object is a precondition for the existence of economic exchange, in other words for a form of exchange that functions through the codification of value according to a scale that can position objects in terms of their equivalence and difference. This parallels the structure of identity/difference in linguistic terms, whereby identity constitutes the positive or marked term and difference is the negative or unmarked term: a binary structure that designates the same or not the same.⁵ This structure is assumed and naturalised within political economy and within Saussurian linguistics. It is not possible to critique such a structure from ‘nowhere’; the critic must take a stance that provides a view on that structure, and Baudrillard’s critique is from the viewpoint of, or by way of contrast to, what he calls ‘symbolic exchange’.

Symbolic exchange is the radical ‘other’ of economic exchange in all respects. The ‘symbolic’ character of the exchange means there is no autonomous object, no autonomous subject, no code, no possibility of economic value. The object takes on its meaning in the relationship of exchange. This meaning is always and only ambivalent – it is neither this nor that; the object has no ‘identity’ in a positive (+) sense. Symbolic exchange is a process of non-essentialist, dynamic challenge and seduction; a social process whereby objects seduce, meanings are continually exchanged, the meanings and status of subjects are always ambivalent. Power is squandered and laid to waste.

I am very aware that numerous questions are raised by this characterisation of symbolic exchange, questions that will be addressed throughout this book. What is meant by ‘symbolic’? What is meant by ‘power’? What is ‘seduction’? What is the significance of ‘ambivalence’ in this context? How, in what way, are these conceptualisations important to feminist inquiry? Precisely how symbolic exchange differs from economic exchange is discussed in this chapter in more detail below, to provide a background for the exploration of these questions.

The Ideology of Needs

Metaphysics itself has never done anything else in western thought but posit the subject and tautologically resolve its relation to the world.

(PES: 71)

The entire logic of economic exchange value is predicated on the inalienable assumption of use value. In other words, to be able to assign an economic value to a commodity (a structural precondition of the commodity form), it has to be placed on a scale of value (more than this, less than that, equivalent to itself and others that are the same – have the same identity); so the question then becomes ‘Where does the value on this scale actually come from?’ In the discourse of classical and neo-classical economics, in the critique of Marx, in the assumptions of western metaphysics, it comes from the usefulness of the commodity to the individual. The individual is assumed to have ‘needs’ and these needs (and desires) are, a priori, the natural basis of the logic of economic value, a logic of utility, or use value (I am thirsty; I need a drink; a glass of water is useful to quench my thirst). As Baudrillard writes, the postulate that humans are ‘endowed with needs and a natural inclination to satisfy them’ is never questioned (PES: 73).

Crucial to an understanding of Baudrillard’s critique (of economic and Marxist ideology) is his argument that the presumption that human beings have needs is simply that; a presumption, an ideology. Rather than accept this axiomatic origin, Baudrillard constructs an extraordinary and compelling argument of immense import, that the notion of humans as subjects with needs that are satisfied by objects in the world is an ideology. Baudrillard was not the first to identify the importance of such a critique but developed his argument building on the observations of Bataille (1967, trans. 1988). Baudrillard argues that, rather than preceding economic exchange value as the point of origin from which all economic systems and modes of production derive their meaning and raison d’être, the notion of needs, the notion of use value, follows the ideological construction ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Ideologies of Meaning and Value
• 2 The Fictions of Identity, Power, and Desire
• 3 Simulated ‘Difference’, Simulated ‘Politics’
• 4 Hyperreal Genders
• 5 The Inevitable Seduction
• 6 Feminism and the Power of Dissolution
• Notes
• Bibliography