The Singular Politics of Derrida and Baudrillard

Mihail Evans

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137488565
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Recent years have seen the rise of anti-politics as a political phenomenon. Beyond this new rejection of the political class there has long existed a deeper challenge to the political itself. Identifying the work of Derrida as 'a politics' and that of Baudrillard as 'transpolitics' this book charts convergences and divergences in their approaches.

1

The Symbolic and the Impossible

Abstract: This chapter turns to examine Baudrillard’s early work up to the publication of Symbolic Exchange and Death in the mid-1970s. The development of his early critique of the object in consumer society is followed as it develops into a post-Marxist position. Particular attention is paid to For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign and his distinction between signification and the symbolic that is said to remain beyond it. Derrida, in Baudrillard’s only named criticism of him, is claimed to be of the party of the signification in a passage that is found to be mistaken in a number of respects. Derrida’s own position is brought out via a discussion of his criticism of Lévinas’ for positing an other that appears to be absolutely other in Totality and Infinity. The related question of the impossible is used to suggest the need to rethink the relation of the semiological and the symbolic via readings of Bataille and Mauss as well as a discussion of deconstructive criticisms of Situationist politics.

Evans, Mihail. The Singular Politics of Derrida and Baudrillard. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137488565.0004.

Derrida’s only explicit remarks on Baudrillard were made during a series of interviews in 1993 with Bernard Stiegler largely concerned with the question of ‘the media’.¹ There he both explicitly (albeit briefly) and implicitly criticizes Baudrillard’s positions and strategies at the same time as agreeing with certain notable statements about the media and the Gulf War. The immediate context for Derrida’s remarks can be seen as the publication of Baudrillard’s much misunderstood series of essays The Gulf War Did Not Take Place in 1991 (themselves an encapsulation of his long held views on the media). But in order to understand what is at stake in this engagement it is necessary to more extensively trace out Baudrillard’s thought. In this chapter I will look at ‘generalized political economy’ from his earliest work before moving on to ‘simulation’ and the various terms associated with his strategy of duality and reversibility in the next. ‘Generalized political economy’ was presented for an English speaking public in the essay collection For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign and I will start there. It is also the only place where Baudrillard explicitly mentions Derrida by name, in his theorization of the sign.

Between For a Critique and the latter work for which Baudrillard is best known, there is dramatic break in terms of method and language, yet this change belies important continuities. Indeed, much of what he attempts to achieve with his theorization of simulation follows from his account of signification and his theorization of a ‘generalized political economy’. Baudrillard’s earliest work studied the everyday world and the objects that fill the lives of those living in a consumer society. Seeking to analyze ‘the social function of objects’ Baudrillard moved on to a broad criticism of consumer society and the logic which governs it. He began by arguing that we should cease to see objects in terms of needs and use value but rather to regard them in the context of the place they occupy as part of a systemic whole. The method of such an analysis draws on Barthes’ The Fashion System and through it Baudrillard challenges sociologists who read objects as an index to a simple ‘objective’ social position. Instead, similar to Bourdieu, he sought to draw attention to the myriad of behaviours whereby individuals sought to distinguish themselves through their choice and deployment of objects. It was the study of this behaviour that led him to contest the idea of the primacy of the usefulness of objects and to come to see them as, above all, distinguishing markers. Early on in this work, he describes a structure that will recur through all he has to say, describing what occurs when need appears to govern the choice of object as ‘a functional simulacrum ... behind which objects would continue to enact their role of social discriminants’.² Objects appear to subjects as functioning in one way whilst actually working according to a different logic. It is the exposure, and countering, of this logic that Baudrillard will concern himself with. Yet this is not the tearing away of a veil of ideology: it will be a position which argues that a return to a world of use values is no longer an option. To counter the ‘system of objects’ and its relentless positivity will require a much more radical strategy.

Baudrillard moved on from his initial analysis of objects by generalizing his analysis of their syntax and practice into a total theory of the social. Explicitly related to Marxist theory, presented as an elaboration of it and using its language, this work in effect surpasses Marxism in calling for a ‘revolutionary praxis’ very similar to that of Bataille (whom I will return to in a moment). Baudrillard agreed with Marx that bourgeois political economy had covered over the way capitalist society was ruled by ‘the generalized system of exchange value’.³ For Baudrillard society is indeed dominated by an abstracted system but for him this is not that of the commodity, but rather, that of the sign. He claims that only by exploding political economy into a generalized political economy, one that primarily concerns signification, can Marx’s analysis be recaptured today: ‘the object of this political economy ... is no longer today properly either commodity or sign, but indissolubly both’.⁴ The act of purchase is not, as Marx believed, the reconversion of an exchange value into a use value, rather it is the conversion of exchange value into sign-exchange value.⁵ This entails a rethinking of Marxist assumptions concerning power: ‘domination is thus linked to economic power, but it does not “emanate” from it automatically and mysteriously; it issues from it through a reworking of economic value’.⁶ And again: ‘in the economic order it is the mastery of accumulation of the appropriation of surplus value, which is essential. In the order of signs (of culture), it is mastery of expenditure, that is decisive’.⁷ Baudrillard here moves away from any position that would generally be regarded as Marxist. Indeed, he argues that the order of signs ‘activates a mode of production radically different from that of material production’.⁸ Further suggesting that: ‘the commodity is immediately produced as a sign, as sign value, and where signs (culture) are produced as commodities’.⁹ In such statements there is no possibility left open of returning to an uncontaminated use-value, which thus undermines many forms of radical politics including Marxism. Certainly, Baudrillard effectively abandons any Marxist model of culture as infrastructure and superstructure, of ideology as a cloak of the economic. Instead ideology becomes ‘the process of reducing and abstracting symbolic material into a form’.¹⁰

Baudrillard’s strategy is to champion the (apparent) concreteness of the symbolic against the world of signification. With For a Critique he makes a break from the Marxism of his early work and forges an alliance with the ‘anti-economism of the Durkheimian tradition’.¹¹ Similar to Durkheim and Mauss, Baudrillard makes an appeal to ‘a mode of relations (of communication and confrontation) [that] has been destroyed with the development of the modern world and replaced by inferior, less human, relations’.¹² This is based on a belief in the continuing presence and possibility of a radical principle that can be opposed to our contemporary world. Where Baudrillard significantly departs from this tradition, however, is in failing to make a positive conception of that which escapes economy. He does not speak of the sacred, the gift or the festival but rather only of ‘a loss of the symbolic’. I agree with Merrin’s assertion that this is done in an attempt to ‘avoid a commitment to the resurrection of any specific social phenomena drawn from anthropological data, privileging instead the mode of relations which the phenomena incarnate’.¹³ We shall see, however...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  The Symbolic and the Impossible
• 2  The Subject of the Simulacrum
• 3  The Media of the Event
• 4  The Silent Majorities and the Democracy-to-Come
• Conclusion: Beyond Anti-Politics
• Bibliography