POWER AND SEDUCTION
BAUDRILLARD, CRITICAL THEORY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
Charles Levin
Introduction
This essay presents a condensed version of an argument about the sign, the
object and the symbol., Its purpose, then, is to suggest how psychoanalytic
thought, particularly "object-relations theory", may provide a way out of the
stalemate in critical theory .2
The theory of reification, although essential to critical theory, is itself based
on intellectualized reifications of what it means to be a "subject". and not an
object .3 The traditional theory of reification is described in the light of
Baudrillard's work and then rejected in favour of another which views
reification as an obsessional project of closing down or emptying out "potential
space".
The phrase "potential space" was coined by D.W. Winnicott to refer to a
dimension of "transitional" phenomena intermediate to subjectivity and
objectivity. My most basic theoretical assumption is that the "space" of the
"transitional object" is a place where people actually live, where they are
creative, where they interact in depth, and where -things are invested with
meaning.
The best general approach to Baudrillard is through the philosophical
tension in his work between structuralist social theory (Levi-Strauss, Barthes)
and critical theory (Lukacs, Marcuse) . These are the two modern traditions,
dragging their French and German antecedents with them, which are most
obviously at work in Baudrillard's early texts . It would be a mistake, however, to
think that he ever synthesized them, although it is true that the interplay of
structuralism and cultural Marxism determined, to some extent, Baudrillard's
own distinctive way of choosing a post-structuralist position. The net theoretical
effect is more like the introduction of two corrosives which, having devoured
each other, leave nothing behind but a luminous theoretical vacuum. Baudrillard's
writing has, since LEchange symbolique et la mort4 increasingly approximated a
blank surface reflecting only the awful terror of what it had once tried to name.
What is interesting about critical theory and structuralism together (at least,
in the medium of Baudrillard) is the dilation of their theories of the object . A
reading of Baudrillard makes one want to return to these traditions simply to
listen to the way objects are talked about. Baudrillard caught this element in
their discourse early on,5 and developed it rapidly . Armed with just the two
theoretical languages, the neo-Marxian and the structuralist, he abandoned
himself to the world of things .
-
Jean Baudrillard has a knack for a kind of McLuhanesque "in depth
participation," and he turns the two theoretical languages into quite precise
tools of description which evoke the object world with amazing poetical force and
tension . Although in the endhe virtually destroys both structuralism and critical
theory (something Baudrillard does to almost everything he touches), he has
managed to extract and deliver a lot of what is interesting in the two traditions
before bringing them into mutual disrepute . Most of this material has to do with
objects .
Before Baudrillard critical theory had a great deal to say explicity about
objects, which is odd because critical theory has always claimed to be more
concerned with the fate of subjects . It can be argued, however, that critical
theory has very little of value to say about subjects . According to critical
theorists, subjects are beings that make things ; they experience a world (usually
one they have made themselves without knowing it) ; they transfer their feelings
onto the world, and they internalize authority . In other words, subjects are
beings who (according to critical theory) produce, project and introject .
Structuralists aren't much better on this score, although on the surface they
may appear to be more sophisticated. Usually, a structuralist begins by arguing
that the subject is not an ontological category. There is some value in this
argument. But then the structuralists go on to imply that subjects are not
epistemological categories either . They do this by arguing that the subject is
"decentered" . This is true, but not very interesting by itself, and not very
different from what critical theory has already said. After all, what does
decentering mean, if not producing, projecting and introjecting? The only
difference is that critical theory disapproves of ibis sort of heteronomy, and
wants to get rid ofit, whereas structuralism thinks itis a good thing, and wants to
extend it. Both traditions agree that the subject's experience is false, but not on
the reasons why . There is nothing new in these arguments, taken by themselves,
but something quite interesting happens when Baudrillard plays them off, one
against the other.
'
Baudrillard is usually thought of as a structuralist or a post-structuralist
thinker rather than as a critical theorist in the tradition of the Lukacs/Frankfurt
School. But in fact, he remains deeply involved in the latter tradition. It is true
that he has made his name as a debunker of Teutonic theory and is notable for
being openly anti-dialectical . But Baudrillard is not just contra Marx: he is also
contra Foucault, contra Saussure, contra Levi-Strauss, contra Freud, contra
Deleuze, etc. In fact, Baudrillard is against any thinker whose ideas he takes
seriously . To use a word of Marx's, he is a "counterdependent" thinker . His
arguments nearly always depend on the credibility of the categories of the other
thinkers he defines himself against . This feature of Baudrillard's discourse is
quite typical of critical theory, and secretly dialectical . Perhaps he is saying that
if dialectics are not, in his view, an intrinsic property of the world, they are
certainly a feature of discourse about subjects and objects . At any rate, when
IDEOLOGYAND POWER
Baudrillard launches his critique of critique in The Mirror ofProduction, histone is
not so much that of a dyed-in-the-wool structuralist as that of a critical theorist
denouncing himself.
There is another, more fundamental reason why Baudrillard should be
considered a critical theorist. In fifteen years, since his first sociological
publications, which were a review of McLuhan's Understanding Medial and his
own Lesysteme desobjets, Baudrillard has not written a single thing which was not
an attempt to elaborate a theory ofreification a la Lukacs, Horkheimer, Adorno,
Marcuse-with a strong dose ofBenjamin. Thetheory of reification is ofcourse
a story about a struggle between subjects and objects in which objects appear, if
only temporarily, to have gained the upper hand. Broadly, a theory of reification
is not only a theory of misplaced concreteness or of false objectivity (which
implies a false subjectivity, of course) ; it goes further and claims that when
objects are misunderstood in this way, theyreturn to haunt the subject and spoil
his whole experience. The theory of reification which Baudrillard works with has
definite roots which go all the way back to Georg Lukacs and Karl Marx. Like
Lukacs' important work, all of Baudrillard's work is a meditation on Marx's
theory ofcommodity fetishism . This makes Baudrillard a critical theorist . There
is nothing more essential to cultural Marxism than the theory of reification,
which at root is always based on the idea that the structure of the commodity is
in some way the abstract essence of capitalist life. If in his later work
Baudrillard seems to part more and more with the rationality of critical theory
and its interest in the emancipation of subjects, I think it is because his theory
has developed gradually into something quite different from the traditional
critical theory of reification : it has turned into what Baudrillard now calls
"simulation" . But this is still a theory of reification .
In order to explain this development, it is useful to return to Baudrillard's
very clear analysis in Critique ofthe Political Economy of the Sign? The argument is
quite complex, and it depends first of all on a reading of Marx's theory of
commodity fetishism .
Marx argued that objects (i.e., produced goods, or use values) are turned into
commodities when they acquire through a - complicated socio-historical
development the additional characteristic of exchange value . Apart from the
details which make this development specifically capitalist, one can say that, in
Marx, to the extent that objects seem to become pure exchange values, they enter
into a system, the commodity system, which appears to act independently of
their producers and consumers. The origin of objects in labour and their
purpose in satisfying needs tend to be obscured from public view. This is the
argument that Lukacs elaborated into the theory of reification .8 It claims that
this false and borrowed power ofobjects can operate on three and perhaps even
four levels : 1) the socio-economic ; 2) the epistemological ; 3) the practical; and
4) sometimes also the erotic.
Through the lens of critical theory, Marx can be read as having said or nearly
having said: 1) that social beings are deprived oftheir social ground by a process
of extraction, which robs them of economic power; 2) that they are thereby also
deprived of their (social) knowledge by a process of abstraction which is induced
by the systematic and objectivistic quality of exchange value; 3) having been
economically reduced and cognitively seduced, people begin to forget how to
respond: they can no longer act or reciprocate . They can only react to what is
"given", as if what is given were an intractable "second nature" .9 And finally,
4) we might add, following the arguments of many critical theorists, that there is
a fourth dimension to the effects of reification -the one that I have described as
erotic . Social beings not only tend to lose their power to be, to perceive and to
act: reification also neutralizes or restricts or damages their ability to fantasize,
which lies at the very root of everybody's ability to think.
Of course, this last dimension owes something to Freud. All told, reification
amounts to a very serious charge to make against anybody, let alone a whole
society. It means that commodity fetishism - or if you like, falsely perceived
objects - are such a powerful force that they penetrate deeply enough into the
lives of individual subjects to control their inner worlds. It sound like aparanoid
fantasy, like something Judge Schreber might have thought up.
Now there are two things about this theory of reification that are important
to note . The first is that it is hard to imagine how critical theory could ever do
without it, for the notionthatthe commodity form somehow congeals all the bad
contingencies of an historical era is fundamental . How can critical theory
continue to be critical in the absence of some such hypothesis? The second is
that it is hard to imagine how the theory of reification could possibly be true .
Now, these questions have beenraised in a way that is obviously slanted for
the purpose of discussion Baudrillard's work. Some detail may be distorted, but
the underlying issues are fundamental, and Baudrillard has responded to them
in a highly original way which is still coherent with the critical tradition.
Equipped with the theoretical language of structuralism and some insights from
French writers such as Bataille and Foucault, Baudrillard waded into some very
deep water indeed in the mid 1970's, and he took critical theory along with him.10
There was something quite innocent about this at the beginning. In his 1967
review of McLuhan, he said that when you generalize the slogan "the medium is
the message" you have the "very formula of alienation in a technical society" .
He was interested in looking atthe commodity as a medium of social values and
as a model of public discourse . The idea was very simple.
All that Baudrillard did, in fact, was to point out that the object becomes a
commodity not only by virtue of being an exchange value, to be measured and
exchanged against other exchange values ; the object is also and especially a
commodity because it is a sign ., I (This seems so obvious to many of us now that
perhaps it should be disputed in order to make the whole discussion more
interesting .) It means of course that the commodity is a signifier and a signified,
with all the features of abstraction, reduction, equivalence, discreteness and
interchangeability implied in the Saussureantheory of the sign. A commodity is
notjust an exchange value which obscures its origin in labour as anobject of, by
and for utility ; it is an object which has been inserted as an arbitrary term into a
purely self-referential system of signifiers which decides the object's meaning
before anyone can possess it or consume it or give it away. The commodity is an
object in a system of objects ; it is consumed as a sign of that system.
Baudrillard calls this phenomenon the "sign-object". He replaces Marx's
notion of the commodity form (which is a social form tending to obscure the
object's content) with the idea of an "object-form" . This object form is also a
social form, like Marx's commodity, but it has much deeper implications. What
it "veils in mystery" is not the object's real value: its origin in labour and its
finality in the moment of consumption - i.e., its use value. What the object
form conceals is the object's own "nullity" . The commodity is a res nulla : a
symbolic absence. Or to put it another way, the object form (the commodity as
sign) exhausts and evacuates the social space it occupies . It hides the fact that
its meaning does not exist in a relationship between people (what Baudrillard
would call Symbolic Exchange), but in the inner relations of signs and
commodities among themselves.1z
As a structural model of reification, this "object-form" is a much more
radical hypothesis. It cuts deeper and gets to the 'real' sub-stratum of the social
object : its use value. With the logic of signification as his tool, Baudrillard pries
apart the bundle of relations which constitute the commodity, only to discover
that use value does not designate the otherness of political economy at all, but
its ideological groundwork. For included in the object form is precisely the
assumed functionality and utility of commodities that Marx had wanted to
restore to society by liberating the means of production and abolishing
exchange value. According to Baudrillard, use value is simply a product of the
alienated system of exchange itself. It is notthe meaning of the object, anymore
than the signified is the meaning of the sign: it is the effect of the play of
signifiers. To use a phrase ofAdorno, use value is not the "non-identical side" of
the object ; it is not a moment of particularity or of quality, such as might be
found outside the form in the 'real' act of "consumption" . Perhaps this explains
the somewhat strained atmosphere ofthe Frankfurt School's attempts to explain
the fetishization of culture in terms of exchange value.13 For use value turns out
to be an alibi for the exchange value system, rather than its hidden or repressed
truth. It does not escape the logic of reduction, equivalence and fungibility
imposed by political economy. On the contrary, it is political economy - its
ideal and ideological referent.14
The consequence ofthis argument, of course, is gradually to shift the stance
of traditional critical theory away from anti-objectivism to an intensified
critique of naturalism. Eventually Baudrillard will carry this forward from the
naturalism of Political Economy and Marx's critique of itto the functionalism of
the Bauhaus, to the naturalism of the unconscious in various schools of
thought, from Surrealism on to Deleuze, and finally to the "hyper-reality" (as
Baudrillard calls it) of constituted self-regulating systems, which range fromthe
naturalization of coded difference in molecular biology (DNA) to the cybernetic
design of social life itself.1s
But the critique of the political economy ofthe signremains the centrepiece
of Baudrillard's work. One cannot read his earlier books on objects and
POWER ANDSEDUCTION
consumption without anticipating this re-evaluation of all socio-economic
values . The new model of reification that emerges transforms the whole
problematic of the commodity, which has been the core of critical theory and
cultural Marxism since Lukacs . And all of Baudrillard's subsequent work flows
from this conceptual realignment. The key to it, of course, was to read semiology
right into the process of political economy, to find the logic of signification in
the very structure ofthe commodity. What is important to grasp, however, is that
this is notjust another synthesis . There have been plenty of attempts to combine
Marx and Freud. Baudrillard's inspiration was different. He wanted to use
structuralist theory as the mimetic description language of reification as such.
In Baudrillard, the Saussurean model of language really becomes the action
language ofthe commodity; and the apparent self-sufficiency ofthe structuralist
model of the sign delineates for him the form of reification as a social
phenomenon. An interesting consequence of this in the later books, beginning
with L Echange symbolique et la mort, is that the equation commodity = sign =
reification evolves with the internal transformations of the theory of the sign. As
semiology begins to devour its own tail in post-structuralist discourse and in the
work of Derrida in particular, the theoretical description language of structuralist
discourse is no longer projected into the commodity, but hypothetically
reembodied as the pure mediumof reification, so that the opaque involutions of
theoretical language come to serve as the perfectly transparent and unwitting
surface of social reality .1b Baudrillard calls this involution, "simulation", which
is nothing other than reification as total semiosis, which now includes the body
- or corpse - of social theory itself .
If the cutting edge of this conceptual reconfiguration is Baudrillard's
attempt to introduce the question of meaning to Marxian discourse, this does
not mean that he is able to tell us so much about the nature of social life today
that we might not already have guessed . For this cutting edge is turned almost
completely inwards, toward critical theory . Looking through the closing pages
ofLe systeme ties objets or La societe de consommation, the early works, we already
find a host of disclaimers which testify, sometimes in a brilliant way, to the
profound moment of self-doubt in the act of critique . What is relatively new in
Baudrillard is the recognition that this moment of doubt redeems the
recalcitrant object, and that there is no salvation without the object . The
analysis of consumption begs the question of interpretation; it forces critical
theory up against the consequences : it's interpretation or die . )rchange
symbolique or la Mort.
The fact that critical theory has systematically avoided this question is nowhere
more obvious than in the traditional theory of reification, or more
precisely, in the doctrine of commodity fetishism, which underlies all of critical
theory's and cultural Marxism's vision of the modern age . Marx was never
interested, in the interpretation of commodities . He was concerned with their
"historical character", but not with their "meaning", which he dismissed as an
illusion in the early chapters of Capital .17 We can hardly blame Marx for not
being attracted to the problem, but it is difficult to forgive the Frankfurt School,
which professed to be concerned with culture . For what they fail to achieve, on
the whole, is any charitable understanding of the role of things in the lives of
people. Instead, the standard discourse of critical theory is laced with old
Christian sentiments about people destroying their souls by worshipping
powers they do notunderstand because they have projected them onto material
objects . This is another way of saying that people are worshipping a false god, a
graven image. Adorno was something of an exception to this at the theoritical
level, but he was just as intolerant in practice . He described jazz enthusiasts as
"temple slaves" prostrating themselves "before the theological caprices of
commodities". He described people going to a Toscanini concert as worshipping
the money they had spent on the ticket . This is the theory of commodity
fetishism . It is part of a kind of religious or moral controversy, a sort of
monotheistic attack on animism.
When critical theory is at its worst, what it wants, what itstrives for, is a world
without objects . The projected ideal is a kingdom ofends, the end of mediation.
There is nothing outside absolute spirit anyway. It does not interpret ; it decrees .
The traditional theory of reification implies that so long as the totality remains
inaccessible in its totality to the subject, the subject has been deprived of its
essence. It is a vision of social reality which tends to equate emancipation with
omnipotence .
Interpretation is impossible for critical theory during these bad theoretical
moments because it does not approve of people endowing objects with magical
properties, or projecting human qualities onto the world of things . Instead, they
are expected to exercise magical control over objects . This is written directly
into the theory of commodity fetishism . Objects can only have use value;
everything else is mystification. As,soon as people attach meaning to things,
they plummet into false consciousness . The end of reification would amount to
rational knowledge of the totality . People would have totally transparent
relations with each other, either because there would be no objects to get in the
way, or because objects would only exist insofar as they were rationally
distributed according to need (presumably from a centre), or because they are
only objects of disinterested aesthetic reflection, a type of relationship to an
object which presumably does no harm to the spirit. This is why Marx must have
preferred capitalism to feudalism: it was more rational, it made the real social
relations clearer, there was less meaning to cloud the vision .19 On this view,
commodity fetishism is simply a residue of the old barbaric consciousness .
The commodity ellicits a sort of social projection which disguises the real
relations underpinning it. The object hides social reality. It must be eliminated.
Baudrillard's critique of the sign tries to cut through all this metaphysics .
Reification ...
deidre