Jean Baudrillard and Postmodernism
Aim - To examine and contextualise Jean Baudrillard's theory of hyperreality.
Objectives: (1) To foreground Baudrillard's position, by showing how it develops out of a Marxist critique of capitalism; (2) To examine how Baudrillard's analysis of advertising led him to argue that a consumer's engagements with commodities had begun function like a language; (3) To explore how Baudrillard extended this analysis into a fully blown theory of postmodernism.
I'm giving three lectures as part of the Contextual studies course this term. Our topic today is the Jean Baudrillard's vision of hyper-real postmodern society, and the crisis that he feels the abundance of advertising, retail display, and televisual imagery, has generated in the fabric of social reality.
This will be followed on the 9th February by a lecture on Gilles Deleuze and Felxi Guattari, who deal with similar issues of reproduction and mediation, but see potential for the creation of new forms of social life within these processes.
Then, on the 23th February we will draw together these analyses to examine how artists and designers, deal with issues of social change in their work, by focusing on the issue of institutionality.
Throughout the late 1960s Jean Baudillard examined how the increased productive capacity of western nations in the post war era, and the rise of corresponding industries of marketing and advertising transformed the structure of consumer experience.
Baudrillard argued in texts such as The System of Objects (1968) that with the rise of consumer society, promotion and advertising began to take on a primary role in determining the commodity's value, and the consumer's disposition towards it.
In the 1970 and 1980s in texts such as The Mirror of Production (1973), and Simulacra and Simulations (1981) he integrated the rise of the mass media into this analysis, and developed the argument that our engagement with material reality had now been superseded by a system of representations that saturate our perceptions.
As Harrison and Wood note Baudrillard's “Critique of the political economy of the sign turned into a thesis that reality itself, as something separable from signs of it, had vanished in the information saturated, media dominated world”.
This was Baudrillard's version of postmodernism; a hyper-real world where what we call reality was in fact grounded in simulacra.
In Baudrillard's analysis simulacra have no natural link with a pre-existing reality. One can determine if an image is a simulacra, if one cannot identify a pre-existing concrete reality which that image can be understood to copy.
For Baudrillard simulacra became the dominant form of image production in postmodern society.
This idea was explored in films such as Bladerunner (1982), and grasped the popular imagination in the 1999 with the film the Matrix. The Matrix is a dystopian story about a young man Neo who starts to question the reality of the world he inhabits, and with the help of a gang of renegades, led by a character called Morphious, he leaves the matrix and fights the machines that created it. In this scene Morphious takes Neo back into the Matrix to explain its history and how it is able to function so effectively.
Play Matrix – “What is real extended clip” “Welcome to the Real
In the Matrix reality has been reduced to a blank white expanse, which is filled with constructed images. Here we can start to have a sense of what Baudrillard means by simulacra. They are pure constructions and refer to no reality outside of themselves, and on mass serve to corrode any sense of a tangible reality.
Thus, in Baudrillard's analysis the postmodern consumer's sense of the world around them is generated by the manner in which they are continually bombarded by simulacra.
Baudrillard's theories can appear outlandish to some, and I want to demonstrate how the conclusions that he drew in the 1980s developed out of a Marxist critique of capitalism and towards a fully fledged postmodern theory.
Baudrillard's early writings were grounded in Marxism. The dynamic development of our practical involvement with the world forms the basis of Marx's thought, and the investigation of how this involvement developed in the postwar period shaped the focus of Baudrillard's investigations.
Slide One – 18th Century German Harvest
For Marx our involvement with the world occurs through 'labour', a concept which encompasses both how we shape our environment through our industry, and how our own experiences are rooted within and conditioned by our environment. In Capital Marx defines labour as “the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature, the everlasting nature imposed condition of human experience”.
Thus within this Marxist framework man's relationship with his environment determines the character of his consciousness.
For Marx a determining factor in this relation is man's own productive capacity and his relationship with the products of his labour.
Marx considers that man's industry generates products, “external objects” that are useful, as they “satisfy human needs”. The usefulness of the physical properties of a product makes its use value.
However, as soon as conditions arise where different products can be exchanged for one another they become commodities.
Commodities are possessed of an exchange value, a quantitative relation of equivalence that allows one commodity to be exchanged for another.
One commodity has many exchange values, as its ratio of equivalence is realised through its exchange for varying quantities of other commodities. In their equality they are both equitable to a third thing, a universal equivalent, money.
The exchange relation is expressed through the abstraction of use value. In the exchange relation one use value is only worth as much as another, to which it is deemed to be equivalent.
Slide Two – 19th Century Factory.
Under capitalism the worker's labour becomes a commodity that he or she must sell in order to live. This separates the worker from the products of his labour and makes them alien to him. Marx notes “The externalisation of the worker in his product means not only that his work becomes an object, an external existence, but also that it exists outside of him, independently, alien, an autonomous power, opposed to him.”
Thus in summary: (1) when people produce goods for the market, the value of those goods is not set by their usefulness, but by their ability to be exchanged for other things; (2) the labour embodied in these goods is valued not for its usefulness, but for its ability to generate exchange; (3) people's labour also becomes a commodity, to be bought and sold for a wage.
Marx notes that as soon as a simple object, such as a table “becomes a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to start dancing of its own free will”.
The transformation of production and consumption Baudrillard theorised can be rooted in the rationalisation of capitalist production proposed as early as F. W. Taylor's The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), which advocated the breakdown of each labour process into a series of requisite actions, and organising production around work tasks based in time and motion study.
Slide Three - Henry Ford, Assembly Line
Such an approach informed the development of Henry Ford's automated car assembly line in Michigan in 1913. Ford separated the production process into a series of individual tasks allotted to individual labourers. Each worker fashioned or attached a particular part of the car in a synchronised production process that involved the cooperation of multiple workers, who each contributed to the production of individual cars as they travelled down the production line.
Ford's five-dollar, eight hour day was only envisaged in part as a way of securing the discipline that working in a highly productive car assembly line required. It was also meant to give workers sufficient income and leisure time to consume the products of mass production.
Slide Four – Volkswagon factory Wolfsburg
The form of mass commodity production initiated by Ford was brought into maturity in the advanced capitalist countries in the post war period period, and generated a boom that lasted until the early 1970s.
Slide Five – Billboards in a 1970s American city centre.
In the post war period this massive expansion in productive capacity needed to be met with a corresponding rise in demand, and as factories continually produced large quantities of the same commodities, this demand needed to be made consistent.
Thus a corresponding industry developed; publicity and advertising. During this period advertisements became a ubiquitous phenomenon, colonising both urban space, and home life.
Individual competing adverts would sit alongside one another, or be broadcast in a sequence, yet they acted on the consumer as a system.
John Berger notes, “Publicity is not merely an assembly of competing messages: it is a language in itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal. Within publicity, choices are offered between this cream and that cream, this car and that car, but publicity as a system only makes a single proposal. It proposes that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more”.
Judith Williamson develops this point considering how advertisements seek to address consumer desires, and aspirations, rather than showing how the products they promote might be useful to us. “Advertisements have to translate statements from the world of things, for example, that a car will do so many miles per gallon, into a form that means something in terms of people. Suppose that the car did a high mpg: this could be translated in terms of thriftiness, the user being a clever saver, in other words being a particular type of person. Or, if the mpg was low, the ad could appeal to the 'above money pettiness', daredevil kind of a person who is too trendy to be economising. Both statements in question could be made on the purely factual level of use value by the simple figures of 50mpg, and 20mpg. The advertisement translates these thing statements to us as human statements; they are given a humanly symbolic exchange value.”
Thus in Williamson's analysis commodities are made equitable to desires or aspirations, and through our continual immersion within advertising, the language of publicity becomes a way in which we comprehend how we might find fulfilment.
Slide Six – 1957 - Miller High Life advert. “For the taste of your life “go first class” with Miller High Life.
In his 1968 Essay The System of Objects, Baudrillard examined the ramifications of the rise of marketing outlined by Williamson. Baudrillard's claimed that advertising codes products in a way that determines the consumer's relationship with them.
Poster notes, “advertising codes products through symbols that differentiate them from other products, thereby fitting the object into a series. The object has its effect when it is consumed by transferring its “meaning” to the individual consumer”.
Baudrillard draws emphasis to the motivational research of Ernest Dichter, noting how he used focus groups to encourage consumers to divulge their emotional relationships with products, providing advertisers with information that they could then shape their advertising campaigns around.
Madmen clip – “Focus Group on madmen” 20 seconds to 3:20 mins (interview room observation room)
Dichter notes “one of the fundamental tasks of all advertising is to permit the consumer to freely enjoy life, and to confirm his right to surround himself with products that enrich his existence and make him happy”.
Staging a focus group became a common aspect of planning advertising campaigns in the post-war period. In response to the findings of the focus group adverts were then specifically designed to match products with particular desires or fears.
As a continual presence throughout urban space and within the home, advertisements served to generate associations between consumer needs and products.
Thus in this context the point of sale is re-formulated. The consumers sense of the product's usefullness is superseded by a set of codified emotional connections generated by advertising prompts. Baudrillard notes “the act of buying is neither a lived nor a free form of exchange. It is preconditioned activity where two irreducible systems and confront one another […] this is the forced integration of the system of needs with the system of products”. Further to this such a codification of needs is necessary as mass production requires constant demand for consumer goods if it is to be sustained.
Slide Seven – 1970 Dodge Challenger Convertible “Our plum crazy Challenger R/T is no shrinking violet”
For Baudrillard this array of advertising messages takes on the character of a language. This is made evident with the example of a car, “it is not the concrete structure of the auto mobile engine that is expressed, but rather the, form, colour, shape, the accessories, and the “social standing” of the object”. He goes on, “Needs disappear into products which have a greater degree of coherence. Parcelled out and discontinuous, needs are inserted arbitrarily and with difficulty into the matrix of objects”. This then is the work of advertising, to cohere desires to commodities.
Slide Eight – 1970s Storefront
In his essay of 1970 Consumer Society Baudrillard relates this earlier analysis to the layout of store-front displays and the interior layout of department stores.
Slide Nine –Meat Counter in a 1960s Woolworth's foodhall
“Large department stores, with their luxuriant abundance of canned goods and clothing, are like a primary landscape of affluence. […] by purchasing a portion one in effect appropriates the whole crumbling pyramid of oysters, meats, pears, or canned asparagus”.
The consumer desire for abundance finds representation in the halls of department store, which are are made to signify surplus, affluence and feasting. Products are arranged in stacks, displays or collections that the consumer distinguishes from each other in terms of the needs, desires or fantasies that embody for them.
For Baudrillard “The display window, the advertisement, the manufacturer, and the brand name here play an essential role in imposing a coherent and collective vision”.
Baudrillard understands that products arranged such a manner take on a similar character to that of the linguistic sign in the analysis of Ferdinand de Saussure.
Slide Ten – Saussure Diagram
Saussure examined the status of signs as part of a wider language structure. He considered that linguistic signs were made up of two parts. A sound made by the vocal chords when speaking, or the graphic marks that comprise a word.
Inseparable from the signifier in any sign and indeed, engendered by it, is what Saussure called the signified.
This is the mental concept. Saussure considered that the linguistic sign is an arbitrary construct, produced purely through agreement between users of a given language system.
We can see this by looking at how the same objects are named by different words in different languages.
For example in France the word for dog is “chien”, and in Germany “hund”. The only reason that the signifier does entail the signified is because there is a conventional relationship at play.
Saussure considered that a sign signifies by virtue of its difference from other signs. Saussure called this system of differences between signs “langue”, which he differentiated from individual speech acts “parole”.
Slide Eleven – Supergiant Supermarket 1960s.
Similarly, Baudrillard argues that one cannot comprehend the nature of the consumer's psychological attachments with the commodity if it is considered directly. Rather, one must consider how these attachments converge as a system of signs, which like Saussure's notion of collective signification “langue” are structured by relations of difference. One can see this process in a commercial break on television where adverts converge arbitrarily, and in the distribution of different adverts on billboards throughout the city.
In Baudrillard's argument continual consumer exposure to these campaigns and the presentation of commodities within retail environments themselves, constitutes a system of signification that constructs consumer desire.
The Mirror of Production (1973) marks Baudrillard's break with Marxism. He argues throughout that core Marxist notions such as labour and use value are in fact mirror images of capitalism that are only comprehensible in relation to it.
He argues first that the very idea of use value is produced through relations of exchange. “The presupposition of use value – the hypothesis of a concrete value beyond the abstraction of exchange value, a human purpose of the commodity in the moment of its direct utility for a subject – is only the effect of the system of exchange value, a concept produced and developed by it”. Thus Marx's notions of use value and unalienated labour, are re-conceived here as mere fantasies constructed from within our experiences of wage labour and commodity production.
“The use value of labour power does not exist any more than the use value of products or the autonomy of signified and referent. The same fiction reigns in three orders of production, consumption and signification”.
Slide Twelve – Time Square in the 1980s
From here Baudrillard then developed a fully blown theory of postmodernism. These later writings examine the relationship between images and reality, and consider relevance of the concept of the simulacrum to discussions of contemporary life.
These later texts place emphasis upon the way in which experience has become saturated by media imagery. Within these circumstances representation, which we traditionally think of as following reality, as an image of it, in fact begins to shape the way in which we interpret reality itself.
Baudrillard argues that such simulacra, do not have any referent or ground in reality, and that our cultural condition becomes one of “hyperreality”. In hyperreality images of take on lives of their own and become templates for new realities.
Simulacra colonise reality overtaking it, and shaping the manner in which we interpret and respond to our environment. Baudrillard considers that these simulacra form into a code that extracts meanings from concrete social relations, and redeploys them within the media.
In his essay Simulacra and Simulations (1981) Baudrillard cites the example of Borges's story of an empire whose cartographers create a map which exactly replicates and covers the whole territory. Once the empire falls into decline the map becomes ruined, leaving shreds and tatters distributed throughout a desert. Baudrillard considers this to be a “fine allegory of simulation”.
Slide Thirteen – Frontierland at Disneyland, 1955
He also considers Disneyland to be a prime example of such a hyper-real landscape. “Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of the simulation. […] It is a play of illusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world etc. He argues that the overtly fantastical environment within the park serves to distract attention from the equally vacuous reality outside it, first encountered in the solitude of the massive car parks that surround the theme park.
Slide Fourteen – The Twin Towers
Baudrillard also considered that the Twin Towers stood as an architectural sign of how a concrete social life was being superseded by a code that was free of reference to any reality outside itself. The two towers, whose mute structures replicated one another, ignored the architectural bustle an competition that surrounded them. They existed as one for the other, immune to their surroundings, as a closed series of two.
Slide Fifteen - 9/11 2001
Indeed, the terrorist attack that finally destroyed these Towers can be seen as an example of how the media representations can shape concrete social events. Weren't the spectacular explosions of 9/11, strangely reminiscent of the explosive finales of many Hollywood action films.
Baudrillard considers that examples such as these are indications of how social events themselves are now shaped through the influence of simulacra generated by media culture. Baudrillard notes “all hold ups, all hijacks and the like are as it were simulation hold ups, in the sense that they are inscribed in advance in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the media”.
Slide Sixteen – Blair Election 1997
In Baudrillard's analysis simulacra also invade political policy. Wants, desires, and beliefs forged by the propaganda and advertising, are recorded in opinion polls, which are closely monitored by politicians, and inform the policy decisions.
This vision of hyper-real society formulates Baudrillard's sense of postmodernism, which for him is an era in which progress has come to a standstill. Bertans notes “Baudrillard's relentless dystopic vision of late modernity, as he saw it in the seventies, or postmodernity as he has come to see it, leaves no exits”
Baudrillard himself states “postmodernity […] is a game with the vestiges of what has been destroyed. This is why we are “post” - history has stopped, one is in a kind of post history, which is without any meaning”.
American Psycho clip - Intro to Patrick Bateman
We might consider Patrick Bateman, the main character in Bret Eastan Ellis's American Psycho as an example of the kind of personality that hyperreal society might create. His values are almost entirely constructed through marketing, and he exists in a world of fantasies where his desire to be the envy of others turns into murderous rage.
In summary, Jean Baudrillard's theory of postmodernism developed out of a Marxist critique of capitalist production, focused upon how, in the postwar period, the rise of the advertising industry served to shape and regulate consumer demand, in ways that could meet the increased productive capacity created by the rationalisation of industrial production.
He extended this analysis by focusing on how advertisements, and retail environments formed into a language, which continually re-iterated the same prospect of happiness and fulfilment through consumption.
Then, in the 1980s his focus shifted onto how the proposals made by advertisements and the growing media culture influenced decision making, the construction of social space, and even political policy, ultimately arguing that this replication of social reality brought history to a standstill.
Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Art in Theory 1900 – 2000, (Oxford: Blackwells, 2003) p 1016.
Karl Marx, Capital Vol 1, (London: Penguin, 1976) p 290.
Ibid, p 127.
Ibid, p 127.
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, ed. David Mclellan, Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp 78-79
