Читать книгу Baudrillard with Nietzsche and Heidegger: Towards a Genealogical Analysis - Vanessa Freerks - Страница 10

In the previous section, we established that Baudrillard’s references to Nietzsche are rare and indirect. I now set the scene for my argument that Baudrillard’s work on consumer society re-contextualizes and transposes Nietzsche’s genealogy into a modern setting. This requires first an exposition of Baudrillard’s interest in understanding the structures of consumer society and how there is nothing inevitable or natural about them.

According to George Ritzer (1998, 7) Baudrillard’s Consumer Society is influenced by a range of structuralist ideas, which is made evident by the book’s subtitle, Myths and Structures and the content of the book. Baudrillard treats the world of consumption like a mode of communication and makes use of the tools of Saussurean linguistics including sign, signifier, signified, code. Although Baudrillard’s early work on consumer society operates within a semiological/structuralist paradigm, Mark Poster rightly argues that Baudrillard is reluctant to accept Saussurean linguistics in its dominant forms.7

In Saussure's theory of the sign, a word is a sign, and a sign consists of a signifier and a signified; the signifier is the sound pattern of the word, and the signified is the meaning of the word, which Saussure describes as a “mental image”. The referent is the thing, which is simply left out of his structuralist account.

Saussure’s contribution to the study of language is to show that the meaning of a word, the signified, is not determined by the referent but rather by its place in the system of signs and its relation to other signifieds: the meaning of a word is determined differentially or negatively, i.e., by its relation to other meanings. Saussure sees a relation of arbitrariness between signifiers, and between signifiers and their signified. The signification of words and phrases is neither based on verifiable facts or observations, so signification can only be expressed with a set of words or concepts that belong to a shared language system.8

For Baudrillard, in Saussure’s model of linguistic signification, there is no significance outside the system (of significance) to act as its (external, transcendent) assurance of significance – or, of its truth, because meaning is determined within the language. Saussurean linguistics, as applied by Lévi-Strauss, divides an object into its binary oppositions thereby revealing a play of rules and patterns, without the help of a concept of subjectivity. According to structural linguistics, phenomena are to be analyzed ‘objectively’, irrespective of time and normative evaluations. According to Poster, the “formalism of linguistics, when carried over into social science, implies a de-historicization and a weakening of critical powers” (Poster 1981, 468). Baudrillard, however, revises the a-historicity of semiology and “was probably the first thinker in France to employ semiology both historically and critically” (Poster 1981, 468).

As we shall see below, for Baudrillard, Saussurean linguistics does not merely present us with a theory of language. It describes the consumer morality of late modernity. Baudrillard argues that neither structural linguistics nor our current morality of consumption is universal or natural.

From a Saussurean perspective, consumption is an order of signs. Objects are defined by what they signify and what they signify is defined by their relationship to the entire system of signs. Like the elements of language, no object has a meaning in itself but acquires meaning only in its relationship with other objects. The System of Objects, Baudrillard’s first book, looks at everyday objects in family and social structures. Objects are elements in a code or “system of signification” (Baudrillard 1968, 9-19; 2005, 2) in an abstract system of emblematic meanings, signs.

Individual things can only be adequately described within the overarching system, because their cultural meaning lies only in the context and the frame of the “global system” (Baudrillard 1968, 86; 2005, 70). What Baudrillard means by global system is society and its cultural system of signification, which encompasses the whole of life. This cultural system of meanings is the actual theme of Baudrillard’s investigations. The analysis does not focus on objects themselves but rather on the system of objects. It is not a question of a system of actual objects but more “the system of signification of these objects” (Baudrillard 1968, 10; 2005, 2).

Baudrillard’s system of objects is a secondary semiological system. Above and beyond the world of objects, which is a technical world, there is a second level, which gives things a secondary meaning. “Each of our practical objects is related to one or more structural elements but at the same time they are in perpetual flight from technical structure towards their structural meanings, from the technological system towards a cultural system” (Baudrillard 1968, 15; 2005, 6).

Marx (2018, 49) already indicates this move to secondary signification in his first volume of Capital. There, he describes how exchange value takes over use value. Use value refers to the concrete use of a thing for the person who is using it, whereas exchange value involves the turning of a thing into a commodity (Marx 2018, 49-50). As a commodity, an object can be exchanged for a certain price for another commodity. Use value obeys a logic of human needs, whereas exchange value follows an economic logic of equivalence.9

In Marx, the moment of abstraction plays an important role. The capitalist production process reduces not only the producer or labourer to abstract social labour (Marx 2018, 53) but reduces also the produced thing itself to the abstract carrier of exchange value, where the entire material, sensual world has been abolished. The secondary signification inscribes the object and consumer into the abstract system of exchange value (the capitalist market). The object is turned in one go from a useful thing geared to satisfying concrete needs into an exchangeable object, equivalent to other objects, a substitute, a sign.

Baudrillard radicalizes this thought by claiming that what the capitalist economy does with people and things, namely transforming them into abstract elements within a system, is what the system of consumption also does. The thing becomes a sign not only within the economic system, but also within the cultural one. In the System of Objects, Baudrillard speaks of sign function, which is determined by its being purely cultural, separated from the material level of nature and technique.

“The coherence of the functional system of objects depends on the fact that these objects – along with their various properties such as colour, form and so on – no longer have any value of their own, but merely universal value as signs. The order of Nature (primary functions, instinctual drives, symbolic relationships) is everywhere present in the system, but present only as signs. The materiality of objects no longer directly confronts the materiality of needs, these two inconsistent primary and antagonistic systems having been suppressed by the insertion between them, in a word, of functionality” (Baudrillard 2005, 68).

The role of the word “functionality” in this quote and in The System of Objects as a whole is important. The technical implication of this concept is misleading, and Baudrillard’s approach shows the irrelevance of the technical function within the cultural system of meaning. Functionality is a “myth” (Baudrillard, 2005:60). It is a cultural construct and an “alibi” for function (Baudrillard 1968, 86). Functionality is not a technical category, just like technicity in contrast to technique is not a technical category but rather a mode in a cultural system, which the suffix “ity” indicates. Functionality refers finally to the system of objects itself (Baudrillard 2005, 68).

Baudrillard seeks to emphasize in System of Objects that ‘function’ and ‘use’ are only effects of the sign and rhetorical values within the system of objects. Function must have the “exchangeability of the sign or it is no function at all…everything becomes a sign of a sign, an allegory of the system itself” (Butler 1999, 33). Functionality is emphasized more than ever, yet objects do not have one function but are variable, multi-purpose and adaptable.

“The social logic of consumption … is by no means that of the individual appropriation of the use-value of goods and services ... It is not a logic of satisfaction, but of the production and manipulation of social signifiers” (Baudrillard 1998, 61).

This quote stems from Consumer Society, Baudrillard’s second book, and in it Baudrillard critiques the notion of the sovereign individual consumer who functions to maximize pleasures in relation to a finite but uncoordinated set of needs. Needs (like “functionality” discussed above) are for Baudrillard produced as a “system elements”, and they are not a direct “relationship of an individual to an object” which might in principle satisfy a desire (Baudrillard 1998, 75). Consumption is a structure of exchange and differentiation, situated between a logic of production and one of significations. From the point of view of the “social logic” of consumption, Baudrillard’s (1998, 61) analysis can be understood on at least two levels:

 that of signification and communication (consumption is a system of exchange but also a language (albeit without a syntax)

 that of classification and social differentiation (differences can be ordered in a hierarchy of statutory values).

What is sought in consumption is social meaning. Far from consuming concrete objects for vital needs, “it is the idea of relationship that is signified in these objects, that is ‘consumed’ in them and hence abolished as anything to be directly experienced” (Baudrillard 2005, 221; italics in the text).10 That relationship between signs is what structures social meaning and it drives our desire for consuming objects. The value of any sign is determined by a disciplinary cultural code. The code that drives consumer society cannot finally be a language in the true sense because it lacks a “living … syntax” and functions with a repertoire rather than a diction. It is an “order of classification” – in other words, a taxonomy (Baudrillard 2005, 212).

“The object-cum-advertising system constitutes less a language, whose living syntax it lacks, than a set of significations. Impoverished yet efficient, it is basically a code. It does not structure the personality, but designates and classifies it” (Baudrillard 2005, 212).

What is peculiar to consumer society for Baudrillard is the construction of individual ‘difference’ through the object system. This construction is only possible because “there is no one there – no person. This ‘person’…is absent, dead, swept out of our functional universe” 11 (Baudrillard 1998, 88; italics in the text). Consumers construct a “personality”, “a synthetic individuality” through the manipulation of “marginal differences”, which constitute the sign system (Baudrillard 1998, 88).

Differences are systematically produced in tune with an order, which absorbs and combines them all as identifying signs. Signs are substitutable one for another so there is no more tension between them. As a result, the whole culture becomes a combinatorial machine (Baudrillard 1970, 155; 1998, 104). Consumers must choose from a range of objects, questions and credit companies.

The subject for Baudrillard becomes a ‘person’ through the process of ‘personalisation’, the terms of which are set by the sign-object system. Individual choices are made in terms of objects, signs or images. As Baudrillard explains in Consumer Society:

“The real differences which characterised persons made them contradictory beings. Differences of the ‘personalising’ type no longer set individuals one against another; these differences are all arrayed hierarchically on an indefinite scale and converge in models, on the basis of which they are subtly produced and reproduced” (Baudrillard 1998, 89; italics in the text).

For Baudrillard, advertising maintains the whole system of ‘imposed differentiation’, the choice of coded differentials by which individuals are integrated into the system. William Pawlett rightly emphasizes that the process of “personalisation” is “a site of contestation and active investment not a fait accompli determined from above the system” (Pawlett 2007, 9). The available variety of choice makes ‘personalisation’ possible so that individuals define themselves in opposition to other individuals (Pawlett 2007, 16).

The consumer system is grounded on the idea that the consumer has a choice and the freedom to choose.12 Advertising seeks to represent the explosion of this freedom as we are “given” advertising, so it is “the most democratic of products, the only one that is ‘free’ – and ‘free’ to all” (Baudrillard 2005, 187). Consumers “personalise” themselves according to their choice of brands (Hegarty 2004, 16).

Through his notion of symbolic exchange, Baudrillard seeks to show that structural linguistics ignores that it is a historically-based semiological structure, not a universal truth about language. The sign separated from the referent and understandable only at the level of signifier relations, is a reduction of the symbolic. Baudrillard argues that so-called “primitive societies” engage in symbolic communications: the signifier, signified and referent are all part of the communicative act. In symbolic communication, “signs include […] words that [are] attached to referents and [are] uttered in a context that held open their possible reversal by others” (Poster 1988, 4).

It is important to bear in mind that the relationship between signs and symbols is complex and there is an ongoing tension between the two notions. As William Pawlett (1999, 14) explains both “the symbolic order and modern semiotic system are forms of social discipline. There is little … freedom in either of them (though it is not an either/or situation because they are always found together).”

The main difference is that the symbolic order does not claim to offer freedom. The tensions and constraints involved in symbolic communication are clear and the meanings created are highly charged. This is because symbolic values provoke opposed emotional attitudes within the same person, such as love and hate, fear and desire, attraction and repulsion. For Baudrillard, the emotional-symbolic bonds of human relations are not straight-forward or unproblematic. Whereas, Mark Poster (1988, 4) sees Baudrillard’s notion of symbolic communication as “somewhat nostalgic”, William Pawlett (2007, 14) on the other hand rightly stresses that symbolic relations are not “lost” or “repressed” by the sign-system. “Baudrillard privileges ambivalence” and its “emotional intensities, not specific norms or structures of a symbolic society” (Pawlett 2007, 14).

Before going further into the details of ‘symbolic exchange’ and that it does not represent a lost or separate, ideal realm, I first need to rehearse some elements of Nietzschean genealogy. This will help me clarify the Nietzschean roots of Baudrillard’s critical semiology and show that Baudrillard’s notion of symbolic exchange is not nostalgic.