Baudrillard and Signs

Baudrillard and Signs This book documents Baudrillard’s tempestuous encounters with semiology and structuralism. Genosko illuminates in detail his efforts to destroy structural analyses from the inside by setting signification ablaze with his concept of symbolic exchange. Simultaneously, the book shows that Baudrillard’s project to go beyond signification is fraught with difficulties which return him to a semiotic scene saturated with all kinds of signs. Through this illumination, Baudrillard’s work is situated in the broad spectrum of European and American semiotic traditions. His key concept of symbolic exchange is critically examined and is traced through its maturation and development over some thirty years of theorizing. Also examined are Baudrillard’s engagements with and debts to French theatre and literature with reference to Antonin Artaud, Alfred Jarry and Victor Segalen. Discussion of Baudrillard’s relation to the thought of Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, de Certeau and Lyotard casts light on many neglected features of his work. Gary Genosko is Visiting Research Fellow, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths’ College, University of London. Baudrillard and Signs Signification Ablaze Gary Genosko London and New York First published 1994 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1994 Gary Genosko All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-415-11256-7 (Print Edition) ISBN 0-415-11257-5 (pbk) Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Genosko, Gary. Baudrillard and signs: signification ablaze/Gary Genosko. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-11256-7 : $50.00–ISBN 0-415-11257-5 (pbk.): $16.50 1. Baudrillard, Jean—Contributions in semiotics. 2. Semiotics. 3. Structuralism. 4. France—Intellectual life—20th century. I. Title. P85.B36G46 1994 302.2–dc20 93–49039 CIP ISBN 0-203-20114-0 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-20117-5 (Glassbook Format) For Hannah Contents List of figures and tables viii Acknowledgements ix Introduction: Signs must burn! xi 1 Bar games 1 The table of conversions 6 Bar gains: neither Saussure nor Lacan 17 2 Simulation and semiosis 28 The metaphysics of the referent 34 The model of simulation as a condensed history of modern semiotic debate on the referent 41 A Peircean turn 55 Deleuze and Guattari in the polysemiotic field 57 A Peircean return 68 3 Varieties of symbolic exchange 72 Affirmative weaknesses 72 Juste pour rire 82 Anagrammatic dispersion 84 Lyotard and the primitive hippies 88 The weak and the dead 90 Hostage anti-value 93 Pataphysical gestures 104 4 Empty signs and extravagant objects 117 Salt, sand and simulation 119 Exotes like us 129 Wily props and vengeful objects 135 viii Contents Conclusion: Signs of Baudrillard 152 Notes 165 Bibliography 172 Name index 189 Subject index 193 Figures and tables FIGURES 1 Two-sided physical sign, after Saussure 25 2 Hjelmslev in the polysemiotic field, after Guattari 66 TABLES 1 Logics of value 7 2 The orders of simulacra 42 Acknowledgements I began to think seriously about Baudrillard while I was a doctoral student in the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto, Canada. Sitting around the dining room table at John O’Neill’s house during his Monday evening seminars was conducive to dispelling as much as distilling the theoretical fictions of Baudrillard. I would also like to thank loan Davies, with whom I have worked for many years on the editorial collective of Borderlines and who read an early version of this book, for his encouragement. I also wish to acknowledge the critical advice I received along the way from Brian Massumi, Brian Singer, Marie-Christine Leps, and Ray Morris. In addition, I have learned so much about semiotics from Paul Bouissac that a mere acknowledgement seems to diminish his contribution. Jean-François Côté helped me when Baudrillard’s French became overwhelming, and Baudrillard himself deserves mention for letting a virtual stranger into his apartment. Finally, this book could not have been completed without the support of my partner Rachel Ariss. Much of my work on this book was made possible by awards from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship Program in the Province of Ontario. Derrick de Kerckhove, Director of the McLuhan Program at the University of Toronto, and Chris Jenks, Deputy Head of the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, both provided me with institutional, intellectual, and convivial social support while I was research fellow in both cities in 1992–93 and 1993–94 respectively. Introduction Signs must burn! Born at Reims in 1929, Jean Baudrillard has been active in French intellectual circles for thirty years. He began his career in the early 1960s as a book reviewer of German and Italian literature for Les temps modernes (Baudrillard, 1962, 1962a, 1962b; and Gane, 1991a:6–15). Trained as a Germanist, he translated into French major works by German playwright Peter Weiss, in addition to writings by Bertolt Brecht, social anthropologist Wilhelm E.Mühlmann, and Friedrich Engels, among others. Before the publication of his first major theoretical statement in Le Système des objets in 1968, Baudrillard had produced a significant number of translations of quite diverse texts, many of which remain standard works. The bulk of his work in translation was in the area of theatre and, in particular, the revolutionary ‘théâtre-document’ of Weiss.1 Moreover, before his university career began, Baudrillard was a secondary school (enseignement secondaire) teacher. He arrived in Paris at the Université de Nanterre (Université de Paris X) in 1966 and took up the position of assistant de Sociologie (assistant lecturer), a post in enseignement supérieur (university teaching) below that of Maître-assistant (junior lecturer), to which he rose in the early 1970s in the Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines at Nanterre. He retired from his teaching post in 1987. From 1967 into the 1970s Baudrillard was associated with the sociology of urbanism group around the journal Utopie, and in 1975 he joined the founding editorial board of the cultural theory journal Traverses of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. He withdrew from the latter journal in the late 1980s. Despite Baudrillard’s much xii Introduction commented upon disdain for many of the theoretical inroads made by his contemporaries in France over the last thirty years, he has on at least two occasions, in interviews given during the 1980s, remarked upon the positive nature of his experiences with Utopie. In an interview ‘Intellectuals, Commitment and Political Power’ (Baudrillard, 1984–85: 166), Baudrillard reflects upon the energy generated by the social movements of the 1960s and what he calls the ‘favourable critical position’ which the journal enjoyed since it drew upon the energy of revolt. By the 1970s, however, this energy was used up. Speaking a year earlier (Baudrillard, 1983i:32–3), Baudrillard described this dissipation of energy with reference to Utopie as well as, circa 1975, his new post on Traverses. While at one time a small review like Utopie could consider itself to be part of a movement which gave its members the impression that ‘things were relatively clear’ vis-à-vis the ‘Other, Society and Power’, Baudrillard explains that ‘with the society which developed around the liberalism of Giscard in 1975–76, it became suddenly evident that these little reviews had waned’.2 In 1975, together with Michel de Certeau, Gilbert Lascault, Marc Le Bot, Louis Marin and Paul Virilio, Baudrillard founded Traverses, although he did so without the clarity of vision which had helped to carry Utopie. Traverses was born from ‘a kind of transversality, no longer a transgression, so as to regain a negativity of another type, one which was more interstitial, floating halfway in the institution. Significantly, Traverses is Beaubourg. But it is anti- Beaubourg as well’ (Baudrillard, 1983i: 32). Even though Traverses is still published, it has exhausted itself by enduring beyond its years, in Baudrillard’s estimation, since its play with collusion and the protection and cultivation of a scene is no longer tenable. If one has an interest in drawing a line between Baudrillard’s early and later works, I suggest that the articles contained in Utopie and Traverses, many of which became parts of books which have been translated into English, enable one to establish two coherent bodies of writing toward which two distinct attitudes are clearly marked out by Baudrillard. Further, from 1969 to 1973 Baudrillard was associated with the Centre d’Etudes des Communications de Masse at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, in Paris. Under the auspices of this Centre Baudrillard conducted seminars in addition to those he gave at Nanterre, Vincennes, and numerous other institutions and organizations in and around Paris. Founded in 1960 by Georges Introduction xiii Friedmann at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, the Centre d’Etudes des Communications de Masse publishes a yearly report of its activities in its journal Communications. These reports provide a clear indication of Baudrillard’s activities under the auspices of the Centre and other organizations from 1969–73. His courses at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, other teaching assignments around Paris and abroad, papers delivered and conferences attended, and publications are all included for this period.

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