Page 187 - Cultural Theory

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••• William Merrin •••

consumer and media culture. Thus this chapter has been written on my own assumption
that there are many important aspects of Baudrillard’s work that can help illuminate
our cultural experience: especially his critique of consumption, his critique of polit-
ical economy and its postulates, his Durkheimian theory of the symbolic, his theory
of simulation, his analysis of electronic media and their processes, his characteriza-
tion of the Western production of the real and its resulting hyperrealism, his theory
of the ‘non-event’, his concern with this system’s social control, and his search for
resistant, symbolic forces within a system so perfect that, ‘you only have to be
deprived of breakfast to become unpredictable’ (1996c: 19). All of these offer valu-
able, critical conceptual resources for the cultural theorist, and many popular ‘events’
such as the death of Princess Diana repay a Baudrillardian analysis (see Merrin,
1999b).
But Baudrillard’s critics are right in one respect: the question of our response to his
work is a vital one. To date, most responses have chosen the negative refusal of
his ideas and rejection of his work, to reduce his claims back to established positions
assumed as superior. The Left’s critique of Baudrillard, advanced by Kellner, Norris
and Callinicos, is paradigmatic here, being notable for its ideological aversion to
his non-Marxist analysis, its extreme hostility (see Best and Kellner, 1991; Norris,
1992), and its success in establishing the terms of his academic reception. Its picture,
however, of Baudrillard’s personal nihilism, his denial of the existence of reality, his
uncritical celebration of postmodernity, lack of any critical, transformative project,
and lack of any coherent philosophical project and foundation or expression, is one
whose limitations and errors become obvious with any more detailed reading of his
work. In addition, the critical literature has responded to more specific criticisms,
countering Kellner’s (1989; 1994) claims of Baudrillard’s ‘postmodernism’ (Gane,
1991a; 1991b), correcting Norris’s assertion (1992) that Baudrillard denied the phys-
ical existence of the Gulf War (Merrin, 1994; Patton, in Zurbrugg, 1997: 121–35);
responding to Sokal and Bricmont’s attack (1998) on his use of scientific terminology
(Gane, 2000a: 46–56); defending his concept of the masses (Butler, 1999), and offer-
ing a sympathetic reading of his possible relationship to and use for feminism (Grace,
2000; Gane, 1991b; 2000), in response both to vocal feminist critics such as Gallop
(1987), Plant (in Rojek and Turner, 1993), and Moore (1988) and, it must be said,
Baudrillard’s own negative view of feminism.
As Gane suggests, such critiques are notable for missing their target. So, while
the simulacrum faces an opposition and derision, failing to recognize the long-
standing theological and philosophical pedigree of this concept in the West (Merrin,
1999a), the symbolic, by contrast, is rarely challenged, other than for misplaced
claims of its idealism or nostalgia (Baudrillard is clear, it is an agonistic, not a
utopian, form which is not relegated to a golden age but always radically possible
now). Actually, as Gane admits (1995:120), it is in the symbolic that Baudrillard
becomes open to criticism, as it remains a Western image of tribal societies (Merrin,
2001: 103), an image of a ‘good savage’ (Lyotard, 1993: 106), derived by Baudrillard
from secondary sources (Gane, 1995: 120), to serve as an experiential reality and crit-
ical foundation against the processes of the simulacrum which, apparently, proscribe
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