‘We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning’.

Is it possible to lose contact with reality? To float away from the material world towards something else?

What happens when real bodies can be replaced by holograms, when real food is replaced with perfect synthetics, when real pleasure is replace with pleasure perfectly calibrated to your tastes?

‘What happens’, Baudrillard writes, ‘on the other side of the truth, not in what would be false, but in what is more true than the true, more real than the real?’.

But what if we haven’t noticed that this strange new world has already arrived? Isn’t writing already a virtual reality? Don’t pixels already trick us into thinking the image is real? Don’t artificial flavours already replace any authentic food of the earth with a conceit?

Don’t all of these things already merge in advertising? What is the combination of a text and a pixel and an artificial flavour if it’s based on nothing?

There was a time, in the Middle Ages, when only the superfluous, the excess of production, was exchanged.

There was again a time, when not only the superfluous, but all products, all industrial existence, had passed into commerce, when the whole of production depended upon exchange.

Finally, there came a time when everything that men had considered as inalienable became an object of exchange, of traffic, and could be alienated.

Jean Baudrillard was born in Reims, France in 1929. Like many of his contemporaries, his work crossed disciplinary boundaries. But he is best known for attempting to describe and theorise this shift.

In the Middle ages, when only the the excess of production was exchanged, the rest, Baudrillard argues, was real. Real food, real shelter, real travel – it was not marketised, turned abstract by monetary value and markets.

How have we come from here to a place where everything is defined not by its real value, but by abstract terms?

In doing this, Baudrillard becomes the most controversial, provocative, cynical, and mind-twisting thinker there might have ever been.

He becomes the postmodern thinker par excellence.

We writes that, ‘People no longer look at each other, but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch each other, but there is contactotherapy. They no longer walk, but they go jogging, etc. Everywhere one recycles lost faculties, or lost bodies, or lost sociality, or the lost taste for food’.

As with most poststructuralists, Baudrillard was heavily influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure’s revolutionary theory of language.

Saussure argued that linguistic systems should be studied synchronically – that’s how words relate to each other at any given moment – rather than diachronically – that’s studying the history of a word.

Nietzsche had argued that if you wanted to understand the word liberty, for example, you would not be able to by just looking it up in a dictionary.

You’d need to look at its history, how it’s been fought for and which parts of it have been side-lined or repressed. This is a diachronic reading of a word.

Saussure argued that even this was not enough.

To understand the word liberty, you’d have to understand it in its context, as part of a network of other words in the moment – servitude, slavery, despotism, liberalism.

Words were tied together in a system that gave them meaning – this is a synchronic reading of a word.

Post-war France was undergoing a consumer revolution – electricity, radio, television, washing machines, were suddenly everywhere.

Baudrillard wanted to take Saussure’s synchronic theory of language and apply it to this new world of consumer objects.

His first book was The System of Objects, published in 1968.

He thought that consumer society aims to draw people in by producing systems of objects that all relate to one and another. The idea of the complete modern home would mean that if you had the iron, you’d want the washing machine with the same logo, that if you wanted the blender you’d want the orange peeler.

He could see this logic being applied in the new ways products were designed and styled.

Modern and minimal design simplifies everything so that it goes together – the simple Ikea table goes with the lamp, the iPhone goes with the iPad.

He writes, ‘few objects today are offered alone, without a context of objects to speak for them. And the relation of the consumer to the object has consequently changed; the object is no longer referred to in relation to a specific utility, but as a collection of objects in their total meaning. Washing machine, refrigerator, dishwasher and so on have different meanings when grouped together than each one has alone, as a piece of equipment. The display window, the advertisement, the manufacturer and the brand name here play an essential role in imposing a coherent and collective vision, of an almost inseparable totality’.

In this period, Baudrillard was working in a Marxist framework that applied two values to objects: use value and exchange value.

The use value is tangible – it relates to human needs. It’s how we need bread and housing as humans.

Marx argued that capitalism instead prioritised the exchange value of an object – what it was worth on the market.

In this way a small diamond can be worth more than a house.

This lead to commodity fetishism – we fetishise diamonds not because of their use value but because of their exchange value.

Baudrillard thought that any proper analysis of an object required a third metric – sign value.

The sign value is derived from this Saussurian relationship between objects, represented by signs – images, sounds, language, pixels, adverts.

Branding and a web of related objects imbue an object with a different type of value than any period of the past.

As Baudrillard’s thought progresses he argues that these relationships, an objects sign value, overtakes use and exchange value, and begins to take on a life of its own.

In The Ideological Genesis of Needs, Baudrillard argues that consumer objects are valued in four ways:

• A use value that is functional.
• An economic value based on exchange.
• A symbolic value based on gift giving and personal relationships.
• And a sign value.

Where Marx thought exchange value lead to us fetishizing objects, for Baudrillard, consumer items are further fetishized by their sign value.

Diamonds are suffused with even more value by which celebrity is wearing them and the prestige of the brand.

Perfumes aren’t just about what they’re worth on the market, but are part of a system of signs, sounds, images – linked to movie stars and glamour and sex.

Champagne and fine wine becomes fetishized and collects value through who’s been seen drinking it and where.

Big tail fins on 50s American cars were actually counterproductive but borrowed the idea of speed from the new and glamourous air travel that was taking off.

The value of the iPhone isn’t just measured by its utility, or how much it cost to manufacture, it’s also derived from the space it shares with other related ‘signs’ – the iPad, the iMac, Steve Jobs, the flashy advertising, the social capital of the celebrity with the air pods in.

The way in which we create meaning socially is directed by a number of things, including utility – how useful an item is, but also by aesthetics, by history, or by the power of capital. The powerful display their power through their styles, their tastes, their wealth, which in turn creates a prestige that is attached to those objects, hobbies, or trends.

These different ways of valuing objects become mixed together, but, increasingly throughout his life, Baudrillard argues that in our postmodern world sign-value begins to dominate.

And all of this combines into what he ambiguously refers to as the code – an aggregate of value, dominated by signs, that orders and directs the world of political economy.

It’s a world based on utilitarian logic, balance sheets, capital investment, sales figures, algorithms – all of which are the codified representation of, for example, in the iPods case, the utility of listening to music, the aesthetic design, Steve Jobs’ stage presence, the dullness of PCs at the time.

At this point, Baudrillard’s work becomes increasingly radical.

In 1973, Baudrillard published the Mirror of Production attacking Marxism and breaking from it spectacularly.

Marx argued exchange value dominated. Baudrillard would argue even this was over.

‘The end of labor. The end of production. The end of political economy.
The end of the dialectic signifier/signified which permitted the accumulation of knowledge and of meaning, the linear syntagma of cumulative discourse. The end simultaneously of the dialectic of exchange value/use value, the only one to make possible capital accumulation and social production. The end of the linear dimension of discourse. The end of the linear dimension of merchandise. The end of the classic era of the sign. The end of the era of production’.

In his mature period, Baudrillard took Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase – ‘the medium is the message’ – as one of the defining axioms of postmodern life.

What mattered in this new world was not what was real and material but what was represented as signs. In short, television, and now the computer screen, has come to dominate.

Sign production has replaced material production as the organising principle of society.

In a chapter of Symbolic Exchange and Death titled ‘The Orders of Simulacra’, he outlines how this has happened historically.

His story goes something like this.

A simulacrum is a copy or representation of something – a pictogram, a letter, a sound, a gesture – a signifier.

Baudrillard follows Foucault by arguing that signifiers have becomes slowly detached from their signifieds.

Where once language was a gift from god where tree meant tree and good was what god said was good, we now live in a world where language is freed from any determinant – it’s socially constructed – and we realise that is humanly made and communally agreed upon and so is flexible. Images, paintings, photos, poems, essays, conversations about a tree are simulacra of the tree, but their meaning comes not just from the tree, but from the person’s world view, their poetic flare, the hidden meaning of the story, the composition of the painting, the relationship with the person you’re conversing with.

The signified tree can detach from the real tree.

For Baudrillard, there are three orders of simulacra.

The first, he writes, are ‘simulacra that are natural, naturalist, founded on the image, on imitation and counterfeit, that are harmonious, optimistic, and that aim for the restitution or the ideal institution of nature’.

The painter sitting painting a tree.

The second are ‘simulacra that are productive, productivist, founded on energy, force, its materialization by the machine and in the whole system of production – a Promethean aim of a continuous globalization and expansion, of an indefinite liberation of energy’.

The architect looking at the tree and drawing a house to be built from it.

The third are ‘simulacra of simulation, founded on information, the model, the cybernetic game – total operationality, hyperreality, aim of total control’.

The global architecture corporation algorithmically processing timber locations, stock, numbers, shipping details, to work out the best utilisation of the wood in the most efficient and profitable way.

In each order of simulacra we move steadily away from the real, from the touch, smell and use-value of that single tree in the woods.

Baudrillard writes, ‘the super-ideology of the sign and the general operationalization of the signifier – everywhere sanctioned today by the new master disciplines of structural linguistics, semiology, information theory and cybernetics – has replaced good old political economy as the theoretical basis of the system’.

He calls this third order of simulacra the control of the code.

Codes, signs, language, images break away from signifying anything real.

We now live in a world of simulation.

We are already in the matrix.

Even humans become superfluous to the self-management of systems like self-checkouts, deals determined algorithmically, security replaced with AI CCTV.

For Baudrillard, the mid-70s saw an implosion of sign values and the beginning of the era of hyperreality, simulation, codes – the information age.

In this era there is, ‘No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept. No more imaginary coextensivity: it is genetic miniaturaization that is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks’.

Everything is organised by the code – algorithms dominate in financial services, on news websites, on Instagram, on radio schedules. Computer models simulate war. Economic models dictate policy. Even DNA is altered, based on models and expectations.

The hyperreal governs us more than the real.

In the run up to the 2008 financial crash, the real value of mortgages was hidden under layers of sign value – under deceitful insurance policies and financial ratings based on nothing.

In the postmodern world, everything is a copy of, a simulacra of, something real to the point of the  the real real being forgotten – images are pixels, societies are based on polls. Everything implodes into everything else and ‘real life’ disappears.

Baudrillard invites us to ask what the consequences are of this.

What happens if we lose our grasp on the real – if the real becomes the desert of the real – if we become ‘bathed in a media massage’.

‘It is a question of substitution the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double’.

With fake news, it doesn’t matter what’s real, what matters is how it’s said, who says it, the perspective, whether it will be provocative, will entertain.

Baudrillard wrote, ‘By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials’.

We live in a world where things like reality TV, Disneyland, and Facebook define our lives.

Porn, gadgets, google maps, computer games, fake grass, fake meat, synthetic clothing. We live in a postmodern carnival.

In Simulacra and Simulation, Badurillard points to the absurd paradox of ‘reality’ TV.

He discusses the first ‘reality’ series, 1973’s An American Family.

In 2011, an article in The New York Times said, ‘For the viewing public, the controversy surrounding An American Family doubled as a crash course in media literacy. The Louds, in claiming that the material had been edited to emphasize the negative, called attention to how nonfiction narratives are fashioned. Some critics argued that the camera’s presence encouraged the subjects to perform. Some even said it invalidated the project. That line of reasoning, as Mr. Gilbert has pointed out, would invalidate all documentaries. It also discounts the role of performance in everyday life, and the potential function of the camera as a catalyst, not simply an observer’.

Baudrillard had already written in 1981 that, ‘More interesting is the illusion of filming the Louds as if TV weren’t there. The producer’s triumph was to say: “They lived as if we were not there.” An absurd, paradoxical formula’.

Contestants on reality TV are already hyperreal choices – averages, ideals, chosen with expectations, designed to provoke by their likeliness to entertain in the correct way. Big Brother contestants chosen by how well they’ll fit into a hyperreal narrative, contestants and stars pressured to act and talk how they think they should act and talk under the all-pervasive eye of the camera and the audience.

Television had increasingly adopted this quality.

This is Baudrillard’s complaint about historical films that are ‘a little too good, better than the others, without the psychological, moral, and sentimental blotches of the films of that era’.

Vietnam ‘itself’, he provocatively claims, perhaps never happened. It’s retrofitted through films like Apocalypse Now.

‘The war as entrenchment, as technological and psychedelic fantasy, the war as a succession of special effects, the war become film even before being filmed’.

What was so spectacular about HBO’s Chernobyl? That the depiction was ‘more real’ than the event itself. Costumes, props, special effects and the perfect angle, the Geiger counter mapped onto the score. Already overdetermined by signs – by Soviet storytelling and the twisting of facts at the time – now it’s a product of this x history x politics x entertainment.

Baudrillard’s point is that if we make meaning socially – and words, sentences, paragraphs are defined synchronically – then all of these medias and their sign values drive our lives more than anything real and concrete; more than the town square, the union, the church.

In an otherwise cynical, pessimistic and dystopian interpretation of our postmodern world, Baudrillard does theorise one way out. Symbolic Exchange.

After his break with Marxism, Baudrillard argued that Marx was stuck in, and was a mirror of, bourgeois society. His fundamental fault was placing production at the centre of its analysis, continuing to emphasise work routines, utilitarian reasoning, dialectical history.

Baudrillard argued that a truly revolutionary society would have to break from all of this.

To escape from the overbearing, subjectifying pressure to be utilitarian, to consume and produce based around what is commanded of us, we must look to a way of thinking outside of this.

He points out that premodern societies revolved around religion, myths, or the tribe, not production, and that these ways of organising life were based on things like gift exchange, rituals, and sacrifices.

These may seem outdated, but maybe what underpinned them was something primal, something truly human.

In this way, Baudrillard was almost, as well as a technological determinist, a romantic and a kind of neo-luddite.

He calls it an attempt to escape the ‘law of value’, and argues that the urge is within all of us like Freud’s death drive – the drive to waste energy, to dance, to do good not when its commanded of us but when we feel like it. Festivals are like sacrificial rituals, parties should be whims of the moment, we should be fickle – jump from hobby to hobby.

Bataille looked to the sun as a metaphor, an object that simply expels energy asking nothing in return.

Baudrillard argues that gift giving works in a similar way – giving when the giver wants. This would be the only society in which the individual was sovereign over himself, free from oppression.

He also looks to the aristocracy as a model: they can simply expel energy – drink when the feel like it, self-destruct when they feel like it, make art one minute, take on another hobby the next. Gifts can be given: nothing is asked in return.

Importantly, human beings are not utilitarian creatures but excessive ones with creative desires and irreconcilable urges and drives.

We should embrace this rather than run from it.

In this way, Baudrillard’s theory of history can be divided into three:

• A symbolic, premodern society.
• The productive modern society.
• And the hyperreal postmodern society.

The question he leaves unanswered is where do we go from here.

Notoriously pessimistic but awe-inspiringly innovative, Baudrillard is a difficult but thought-provoking thinker. He describes the world in a way that no-one else has, and while much of what he says might be considered eccentric and hyperbolic, his prescience, writing decades ago, is hard to deny.

He’s also had a powerful effect on our cultural landscape, inspiring films, television programmes and novels.

As humans, we are both attached and detached from the material world around us. The extent to which we continue to float away into something new, and the extent to which it can be a positive rather than a negative experience, is yet to be seen.

Baudrillard knew though that technology wouldn’t just feed our desires, but would create new ones.

He said: ‘It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are’.

Sources

Stanford Encyclopaedia, Baudrillard

Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond

Richard J. Lane, Jean Baudrillard

Cuck Philosophy, American Psycho, Baudrillard and the Postmodern Condition, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJfurfb5_kw&t=98s

Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation