Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond

by Douglas Kellner

This is the first full-scale critique in English of the work of Jean Baudrillard, a fascinating French thinker who has, during the past twenty years, opened new lines of cultural thought and discourse while sharply questioning many of the Marxian, Freudian, and structuralist positions that were characteristic of the previous era of radical social theory. According to a Canadian journal that devoted a special issue to him, Baudrillard is “a a symptom, a sign, a charm, and, above all, a password to the next universe.” The author argues that though today Baudrillard is celebrated as one of the most innovative thinkers in the discourses of poststructuralism and post-modernism, his reception has been remarkably uncritical and ahistorical. There has been little analysis of his complex intellectual trajectory, of his involvement in a series of debates within the French post-May 1968 intellectual scene, and of his dramatic transformations in thinking and writing in the 1970’s and 1980’s. In this book, the author begins the process of mapping out, contextualizing, and critically appraising Baudrillard’s trajectory. He deals first with Baudrillard’s early writings, notably ‘The System of Objects’ and ‘The Consumer Society’, which form the original matrix of his thought. The remainder of the book is organized thematically, analyzing Baudrillard’s early development of a new-Marxian social theory (‘The Mirror of Production’), his break with Marxism (‘Symbolic Exchange and Death’), his turn to a postmodern position (‘Forget Foucault’ and ‘Of Seduction’), and the surprising developments in his work of the 1970’s and 1980’s (‘America’ and ‘The Divine Left’).

Genres: Philosophy

246 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Douglas Kellner is a "third generation" critical theorist in the tradition of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School. Kellner was an early theorist of the field of critical media literacy and has been a leading theorist of media culture generally.[citation needed] In his recent work, he has increasingly argued that media culture has become dominated by the forms of spectacle and mega-spectacle. He also has contributed important studies of alter-globalization processes, and has always been concerned with counter-hegemonic movements and alternative cultural expressions in the name of a more radically democratic society.

Kellner has written with a number of authors, including (with Steven Best) an award-winning trilogy of books on postmodern turns in philosophy, the arts, and in science and technology. More recently, he is known for his work exploring the politically oppositional potentials of new media and attempted to delineate what they term "multiple technoliteracies" as a movement away from the present attempt to standardize a corporatist form of computer literacy. Previously, Kellner served as the literary executor of the famed documentary film maker Emile de Antonio and is presently overseeing the publication of six volumes of the collected papers of the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse. At present, Kellner is the George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Reviews

[v · Rating 2 out of 5]

This early classic of English-language Baudrillard scholarship generally holds up as an introduction to early and middle era Baudrillard, as Kellner clearly explains the ideas in those books and how they fit into the narrative of Baudrillard's career. Kellner's treatment of later Baudrillard, however (1980 onwards, say), is shoddy and snide, and his criticisms of Baudrillard throughout the text are either common-sense or obviously politically- (i.e. critical theory Marxism) motivated. It is clear that Kellner, though he has a good grasp of what Baudrillard basically means and intends, has an axe to grind against him, and the persisting influence of Kellner and those who think (and grind) like him on Baudrillard scholarship (consider, for example, that Kellner authored the SEP article on Baudrillard and gently, but undeniably, dismisses him there as well: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ba...) is noxious.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think that this is probably the best general analysis of Baudrillard that I've encountered. Kellner has some other pretty interesting books out as well.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely solid analysis of Baudrillard across his career (with some devastating and fun critique to boot). I think it really makes the case for why Baudrillard, at least in his works from the late 60s to mid 70s, should be considered by those on the Left (Esp. Marxists).

Early Baudrillard slaps btw

[lalala Manel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Notas/citações: Marxism as ethnocentric and imperialistic; failure to account for other modes of exchange/production that don't fit into current and previous European models (e.g., symbolic exchange), mirroring capitalist conceptions of production, its centrality, and a political economy rooted in utility. Limited petit bourgeois critique, one more step in the banalization of life towards the "good use" of the social.

Critique of The Mirror of Production paralleled by critique of the mirror of desire, thereby opposing Freudo-Marxism dominating 60s–70s French thought: an imposition of a Eurocentric depth model to interpret a postmodern landscape where meaning is destroyed by the profusion of signification and the play of simulation, wherein only the surface remains (though Baudrillard himself did operate within those terms earlier in his career).

Death fetishism and pathological dualism of life and death in contemporary society. If it were nonexistent (e.g., primitive societies and death rites that erase such a distinction/repression), the unconscious would disappear — critique of Freud — linking heavily with Bataille. If death is nonbeing, its incorporation into life would destroy identity in the symbolic/imaginary register, putting in question its field of study.

Contrasting with a Bataillian economy, where pure expenditure and the play of pure activity are given precedence over meaning found in binary codes — unconscious/conscious, Eros/Thanatos — for example, in jokes and poetic language. Freudian theory as rationalistic and reductive, a code, a simulation model: the mirror of desire which — like Marxism — imposes its code on experience in an imperialistic manner.

In Forget Foucault: continuous rejection of all attempts to detect causes behind effects, structures behind appearances (the real, power, the signified, the political, the social, desire…). A simulation-saturated society in which the interplay of codes and simulacra replaces relations of power and domination. Power only, present everywhere and nowhere, decentralized.

Critique of postmodern sexuality: focus on accomplishing desire immediately, the material release of the act as an end in itself, as opposed to ancient sexuality, specifically seduction, where sex was downplayed within a long series of rituals, gifts, and events — making it present everywhere. In contrast, in postmodern sexuality, everything is sex and therefore nothing is sexual (cf. Oscar Wilde). Pornography serves as an example, where obscene exaggerated signs replace and drown the “normal” sexual relation, producing a sexual simulacrum. Sexuality follows the capitalist mode of production and use value.

Freud is right: there is only one single sexuality, one single libido – masculine. Sexuality is this distinct structure, centred on the phallus, castration, the name of the father, repression. There isn’t any other. It serves no purpose to dream of some non-phallic sexuality, that is neither barred nor marked.

Seduction, by contrast, is feminine. Feminists who want to redefine sexuality in “feminine” terms are, according to Baudrillard, still operating within a masculine, productivist model. Irigaray takes feminine sexual pleasure and orgasm as the model of sexuality, arguing that a non-phallicentric model would be polymorphic, disseminatory, plural, and multiple, rather than linear, phallic, and ejaculatory.

But for Baudrillard, the joy of polymorphic sexual pleasure is not the feminine: “The feminine, however, is elsewhere, it is always somewhere else: this is the secret of its power” (Seduction, p. 17). He claims feminists who speak of women’s specific sexual pleasures, writing, and discourse naturalize the feminine, presenting it as the voice of nature or the body. He levels the same critique against sexual liberationists and theorists like Deleuze, who champion freeing natural desire from social constraints. Both fall into metaphysical essentialism and the discourse of nature and truth.

Seduction, rather, subverts fixed dualities between masculine and feminine and eludes definition. The feminine for Baudrillard is not a mark of nature or culture, but a trans-sexuality of seduction that all organizations of sexuality suppress. Seduction represents mastery of the symbolic universe, whereas power represents mastery of the real. Seduction, the strategy of appearances, opposes relations of power. Baudrillard argues feminists who reject seduction as male domination fail to see it as women’s mastery of the symbolic, their alternative to, and means of undermining, male power.

Se não gostava dele porque é que escreveu um livro inteiro sobre o mesmo?

[christian · Rating 2 out of 5]

The embodiment of "Erhm akshually, Baudraillard goes too far!".
Somehow Kellner bourgeoisifies Marxism: the round table eunuch of bureaucratic passivity -- banal castrated Marxism -- the typical droll of modern academic Marxism.