Page 172 - Cultural Theory

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••• Speculation to the Death •••

‘Everything is Sign, Pure Sign …’

Jean Baudrillard was born – appropriately, he later claimed – ‘in 1929, just after Black
Thursday … at the time of the first great crisis of modernity’ (1990b: 144). For him,
the Great Depression and the crisis of overproduction were solved by the system’s
recognition that the population needed to be mobilized as consumers not merely as
labourers and producers, thus, he argues, consumption ensured the system’s survival
and reproduction, providing a new model of socialization and illusory participation
in society (1975: 144). While it was the maturation of this ‘consumer society’ in the
post-war period that Baudrillard took as the subject of his earliest work, in retrospect,
his entire career can be seen to be concerned with tracing both its development and
the outline within it of its own possible crisis and ‘catastrophic turn’ (1990b: 144). 1
France’s post-war consumer society was the product of a series of modernizing
socio-economic and technological changes foregrounding consumer goods, the
media, advertising and fashion. As the structures of society and ‘everyday life’ itself
were being transformed these became important new areas to be theorized, and a
vibrant intellectual milieu developed that would prove to be highly influential upon
Baudrillard’s project. From early sympathies with the existentialist and humanist
Marxist project – with Sartre’s post-war exploration of concrete ‘situated’ life,
Lefebvre’s discussion of alienated everyday life and of the ‘bureaucratic society of
controlled consumption’, and the later critique of the new alienations of ‘one dimen-
sional society’ by Marcuse, and of the ‘society of the spectacle’ by Debord and the
Situationists – Baudrillard also became interested in the opposing structuralist move-
ment, associated with Barthes’ semiological analysis of consumer society, and the
work of Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, and Lacan, and the emerging poststructuralism of
Derrida and the Tel Quel group. In addition, a growing interest in technology and
media can be seen in his reading of Ellul and Simonden’s 1950s work on the domi-
nance of ‘technique’, and McLuhan and Boorstin’s 1960s work on the electronic
media and their effects. Perhaps one explanation for these competing influences is
Baudrillard being drawn to both the Marxist critique of the consumer societies, as
representing not an increase in personal freedom and fulfilment but the penetration
of control, constraint and alienation into every aspect of private life, and to struc-
tural and technical analyses of the operation of this society and of its production of
individual behaviour, thought and experience; all themes which would figure
strongly in his own early work.
Baudrillard came late to this scene, completing a thesis in sociology with Lefebvre
at Nanterre in 1966 where he lectured in sociology until retiring in 1987 to concen-
trate on his writing and public lecturing. His earliest publications on literary theory
and in the pro-Situationist journal Utopie (see 2001a), were followed by a series of
books and essays developing an original critique of consumer society – The System of
Objects (1968 [1996a]), The Consumer Society (1970 [1998a]), and For a Critique of the
Political Economy of the Sign (1971 [1981]). His 1973 book The Mirror of Production
(1975) developed his critical position and analysis of the sign, which were taken up

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