Page 179 - Cultural Theory

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••• William Merrin •••

again, therefore, as a means of social integration and control, in its production of
reality and neutralization of all real response, speech or critical expression and action
(ibid.: 67–9), acting as a ‘leukaemia infecting all social substance, replacing blood
with the white lymph of the media’ (ibid.: 67). Baudrillard’s theory of simulation
clearly does not represent a nihilistic abrogation of political and ethical responsibil-
ity (see Best and Kellner, 1991), but, on the contrary, an intensification of his con-
cern at the totalitarian programming and control of our entire reality.
Although Baudrillard escalates here his picture of the semiotic and its control, he
does not abandon us to joyless nihilism as Kellner suggests (Best and Kellner, 1991:
127), as he also escalates his description of the symbolic and its resistant processes to
counter this. The symbolic – and its ‘reversibility’ – are ‘inevitable’ he argues (1993b:
2), and it remains to ‘haunt’ the society which has attempted to expel it with the pos-
sibility of its own death and reversion (ibid.: 1). It irrupts not simply in resistant,
symbolic phenomena, but at the heart of the system’s own operation, as the result of
its own linear accumulation and development, as ‘the fatality of every system com-
mitted by its own logic to total perfection and therefore to a total defectiveness, to
absolute infallibility and therefore irrevocable breakdown’ (ibid.: 4). Such a fatality
produces a new symbolic strategy of resistance, not of opposition, but of exacerba-
tion, wherein, Baudrillard says, ‘things must be pushed to the limit where, quite nat-
urally, they collapse and are inverted’ (ibid.: 4).
Thus, far from Baudrillard’s escalating theory of simulation providing proof, as his
critics assert, of his complicity with the postmodern system, his theoretical strategy
and methodology itself represent a mode of resistance: a mode of theorizing aiming
precisely at pushing both our critical awareness of the system’s extremes and thus
also the system itself to its hoped for collapse. His critique, in Forget Foucault ([1977]
1987), of Foucault’s theory of power and defence of a Maussian ‘symbolic challenge’
as a force of reversal against all accumulated power (ibid.: 53–4), reinforces his criti-
cal position and confirms his career-long attempt to discover and promote positive
modes and forms of resistance and reversal and a defensible critical position against
the dominant system. Baudrillard, however, becomes increasingly sensitive to the
problems of articulating this position leading to a succession of reformulations of the
symbolic. The first of these, introduced in Forget Foucault, reframes the symbolic-
semiotic distinction around ‘seduction’ and ‘production’ (ibid.: 21). His defence of
‘seduction’ as a mastery of appearances and reversal of the semiotic project in its
withdrawal ‘from the visible order’ that creates a symbolic relationship is an impor-
tant development in his critical position (ibid.: 21), but it also allows him, through
the concept of ‘production’, to step up his picture of the semiotic and its processes
and this is clearly seen in his developing critique of technology and media.

Are Friends Electric?

Baudrillard’s increasing interest in contemporary media and technology represents
an extension of both his early interest in semiotic ‘communication’ (1998a: 60) and
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