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••• Speculation to the Death •••

example, he traces the development of interior design from the ‘traditional environment’
of the ‘Bourgeois interior’, which personifies its complex affective, familial and social
relationships in its ‘presence’ and ‘symbolic dignity’, to the modern designed inte-
rior. The latter liberates the object as a mobile, weightless sign to be manipulated by
their user (ibid.: 15–19), an ‘active engineer of atmosphere’ (ibid.: 26), who, in the
process, though freed from the weight of the symbolic, is enslaved to the semiotic
system and its code. This passage from the symbolic to the semiotic and the result-
ing increase in social control are also seen in his discussion in The Consumer Society
of the body, fashion and sexuality (1998a: 129–50; see also 1993b: 87–100, 101–24;
1990a), which are all divested of symbolic meaning, with the body, for example,
being abstracted as an object requiring a constant investment and semiotic labour ‘to
smooth it into a smoother, more perfect, more functional object for the outside
world’ (1998a: 131). In its management for personalization, distinction and prestige,
today the body is integrated into consumption as ‘the finest consumer object’ (ibid.:
131), immeasurably deepening the processes of social control (ibid.: 136) with an
alienation more profound than any found in industrial exploitation (ibid.: 132). The
fashion model epitomizes this transformation of the body, as, in its erasure of
the symbolic and calculated, stylized, functional, atmospheric signification, it is no
different, Baudrillard argues, from the other mute objects of consumer culture
(ibid.: 133–4).
From Baudrillard’s earliest works, therefore, we already find a clear statement of the
organizing principle of his career in the distinction of the semiotic and symbolic, the
origins of the semiotic in the abolition of the symbolic, the characterization of our
society as defined by this transformation, and a critical sympathy with the symbolic
and its power against the semiotic processes of the West. The importance of this crit-
ical sympathy for the symbolic for Baudrillard’s work cannot be overstated, although
the concept has often been neglected in the critical literature due to the common
assumption that he lacks a critical position, merely celebrating postmodernity; the
relative unfamiliarity of the English-speaking world with the concept and the specific
tradition of French, Durkheimian social anthropology from which he derives it,
and the complex and sometimes contradictory path by which he arrives at its full
articulation. To understand the development and role of the concept of the symbolic
and of ‘symbolic exchange’ in his work, we first need, therefore, to understand its
Durkheimian derivation.
This Durkheimian tradition, developed from the Année Sociologique’s study of
‘primitive’ societies and from Mauss’s works in this field, especially his Sacrifice: Its
Nature and Function in 1899 (Hubert and Mauss, 1964), and A General Theory of Magic
in 1904 (Mauss and Hubert, 1972), received its classic statement in 1912 in
Durkheim’s own study of tribal religion, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
(Durkheim, 1915). Mauss’s popularization of Durkheim and 1925 study The Gift:
Forms and Functions of Exchange in Primitive Societies (Mauss and Hubert, 1966) were
themselves influential in the tradition, inspiring in particular, the short-lived
‘College of Sociology’ from 1937–39 (see Hollier, 1988), whose members, including
Roger Caillois and Georges Bataille, radically developed this sociological-philosophical

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