Page 177 - Cultural Theory

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••• William Merrin •••

categories of political economy, he says, Marxism cannot illuminate the very different,
symbolic processes of ‘pre-industrial’ societies (ibid.: 21–51, 69–91), projecting
instead this economistic model onto all earlier societies, historically universalizing
and naturalizing its economic rationality, thus serving as its ideological support
(ibid.: 33) in seeing all history through ‘the spectral light of political economy’ (ibid.:
66). By this token, Baudrillard also argues, Marxism could not even illuminate its
own age, in adopting a model of the working class imposed by the Bourgeoisie (ibid.:
152–9), and cannot reflect ours either as capitalism has matured since his death into
our expanded political economy, into the ‘monopoly’ phase of the code and its semi-
otic processes (ibid.: 124–9). But these semiotic processes are radicalized here by
Baudrillard as he describes now the sign’s absorption of its signified-referent ‘to the
sole profit of the play of signifiers’ (ibid.: 127), a ‘structural revolution in value’
which would also open his next book (1993b: 6–9), in which signs no longer refer to
any objective reality, but exchange among themselves such that ‘all of reality then
becomes the place of a semiurgical manipulation, of a structural simulation’ (1975:
128). This extension of the symbolic, however, is matched by the irruption within it
of the ‘symbolic demand’, the problem of the demand for ‘symbolic integration’ and
meaning to which the system can only respond with simulation, to create ‘the illu-
sion of symbolic participation’ though its consumer and media culture (ibid.: 143–7).
Again, however, the demand cannot be definitively expelled and it remains an active,
oppositional force against the semiotic.
We can see in Baudrillard, therefore, the dual development of a radical Durkheimian
analysis of the symbolic and its role as a site of opposition and transformation, and a
semiotic analysis of the processes of contemporary society allied to a critique of its
wider code of value. Semiotic and symbolic, therefore, are always entwined and spiral
together in Baudrillard’s work, both in their development and in their radicalization,
and this is seen again in Symbolic Exchange and Death [1976] (1993b) which continues
to develop their form and relationship. It is here that we find Baudrillard’s essay ‘The
Orders of Simulacra’ (1993b: 50–86), which, together with the 1978 essay, ‘Precession
of the Simulacra’ (1994b: 1–42), represents his most famous work on semiotic ‘simula-
tion’, a concept introduced in and developed from his earlier work on the sign and its
processes but here foregrounded as a dominant process in contemporary society.
Baudrillard’s three orders of simulacra – tracing the referential transformations of the
sign since its emancipation from the medieval symbolic world in the Renaissance,
through the industrial, to our own ‘code-governed’ era and its generation of forms
from their model, ‘conceived according to their very reproducibility’ (1993b: 56–7) – have
received much critical attention. Its value lies, however, not in charting a succession of
socio-economic formations from the Renaissance, through modernity to postmoder-
nity (his later addition of a fourth order invalidates this (1992a: 15–16; 1993c: 5–6)),
but in its Foucault-inspired (Foucault, 1970) genealogy of the dominant sign forms of
each era, and their simulacral production of the real.
To understand this, we need to understand first of all that Baudrillard is not sim-
ply claiming a loss of reality today, rather, he is pointing to referential reality itself as
a historical product (see 1993b: 60–1), and, second, that he sees this reality as the
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