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Cultural Studies and the Political Economy of Media Scholarship 129

from materialism and from political economy by giving equal weight to use
value/exchange value on the one hand, and the immaterial sign and symbolic
values on the other. His equation is as follows: “Sign value is to symbolic ex-
change what exchange value (economic) is to use value.” 69
Baudrillard’s materialist proclivities vanished utterly by the time he pub-
lished his perhaps most notorious work, Simulations, and with them the very
possibility of critiquing power and advocating social justice. In Simulations
he maintained that in a world of circulating signs, our perceived reality is
more one of simulation than it is of representation, which is to say that signs
point to one another—more so than, or instead of, to material reality. He de-
clared: “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that
the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding
it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation.” 70
If the real and the fictitious, the objective and subjective, become merely
71
“entangled orders of simulation . . . a play of illusions and phantasms,” as
he claimed, there is little possibility for political economy. Baudrillard him-
self recognized this, writing: “Power, too, for some time now produces noth-
ing but signs of its resemblance. . . . Power is no longer present except to con-
72
ceal that there is none.” He continued:
Is any given bombing in Italy the work of leftist extremists, or of extreme right-
wing provocation, or staged by centrists to bring terror into disrepute and to
shore up its own failing power, or again is it a police-inspired scenario in order
to appeal to public security? All this is equally true, and the search for proof, in-
deed the objectivity of the fact does not check this vertigo of interpretation. We
are in a logic of simulation which has nothing to do with a logic of facts and an
order of reasons. 73

If the reality principle is in its death throes, and if the “vertigo of interpre-
tation” now dwarfs facts, how can one possibly pursue justice? It would make
much more sense simply to luxuriate in the consumer society and forge
whimsical interpretations of media-concocted phantasms—a common post-
structuralist recommendation, according to Frank Webster. 74
We have seen already that Paul de Man at Yale was inspired by French
poststructuralist Jacques Derrida. From chapter 8 it will be evident that post-
structuralist Mark Poster is equally indebted to Baudrillard. And, by
Lawrence Grossberg’s account, poststructuralism defines American cultural
studies.
Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra is Walter Lippmann’s dream come true.
For if nonmaterialists, like Baudrillard, can convince the general public that
simulacra is all there is, then Lippmann’s experts will have even fuller reign.
In the end, whatever he may himself have thought about his own purportedly