Page 139 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

128 Chapter Four

linguistic constructs. It is hard indeed to do political economy in these cir-
cumstances. Moreover, postmodernist thought, if bereft of political-economic
considerations regarding power centers structuring language, controlling and
censoring messages, and directing culture, in effect takes the position that
pseudoenvironments (or, in Jean Baudrillard’s terms, simulacra) are all there
is. Lippmann, one senses, would be delighted. The PR agencies and other
spinners and weavers become absolved not only of the intent to deceive, but
of deception, too. There can be no deception if all is merely interpretation, if
there is no reality.
This dialectic of postmodern thought is well illustrated by comparing the
early and late writings of Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007). According to Mark
Poster (Baudrillard’s editor in North America) Baudrillard was initially a ma-
terialist grounded in the Marxist tradition, albeit one endeavoring to extend
that tradition to encompass the consumer society, but ended up a poststruc-
63
turalist for whom materialist explanations are impotent. Interestingly, Poster
also claims that poststructuralism “is a uniquely American practice,” that the
writings of such seminal French theorists as Baudrillard, Derrida, Lyotard,
and Foucault “have far greater currency in the United States than in
64
France.” Poster’s declaration makes Baudrillard’s writings highly relevant
to the present discussion. I reserve for chapter 8 an analysis of Poster’s own
work.
In “The System of Objects,” first published in French in 1968, Baudrillard
insisted on maintaining a constant awareness of the materiality within which
signs circulate. For example, he related advertiser-induced meanings for
products to social standing and power relations and maintained that this was
the distinguishing feature of our consumer society compared to all others. 65
Moreover, he proclaimed that behind this “code of social standing,” as man-
ifested by owned and displayed commodities, are “illegible” but nonetheless
“real structures of production and social relations.” We may think we un-
66
derstand social relations by “reading” commodities, Baudrillard claimed, but
remaining invisible are the real relations of production and social existence.
Designer footwear, one might say, indicates wealth and creates status for the
wearer, but remaining invisible behind these signs are the Third World facto-
ries, the near slave labor used in shoe manufacture, and the unjust terms of
trade existing between the rich North and the “developing” South. 67
In “For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign,” originally pub-
lished in French in 1972, Baudrillard mapped connections among four types
of value: use value, based on utility; exchange value, based on equivalence;
sign value, based on difference (as in fashion); and symbolic value as in a
68
wedding ring. While in one sense Baudrillard here may be thought of as still
grounding his analysis in materialism, this article actually presages his flight