SAARUTU · Socioanalysis and Alien Anthropology Research Unit at Theory Underground · Master Reference Document
This document gathers the SAARUTU briefs on Baudrillard into one reference and synthesizes them. It is built to stand on its own. A reader who has the briefs in hand will find here the comparative and contrastive work the briefs deliberately leave undone, the recurrence of a formulation across books set side by side, the points where a later work reworks or reverses an earlier one. A reader who has only this document should come away with usable command of the whole trajectory, able to draft an essay on any one of Baudrillard's concepts and find the receipts already gathered, in full, sorted, and cited.
The use it is built for is writing. The spine of the document is the concept lexicon below: each entry gathers every place Baudrillard states a concept, reworks it, qualifies it, or reverses it, each instance carried whole as a block quote with its page anchored, so the recurrence and the variation are both visible on the page. Connective sentences state only the move each passage makes and how the passages relate. They do not summarize in place of a quote. The closer the entry sits to a concept-organized arsenal of full passages, the shorter the distance from this document to a finished piece.
One editorial stance governs throughout. The job is to make present what the texts contain, in fidelity and detail. The document reconstructs Baudrillard's own concepts and corpus and nothing else. It imports no external standard against which the texts are found wanting and carries no application or relevance sections. Where two works pull against each other, or where Baudrillard's account of his own project diverges from what a text enacts, the difference is shown precisely, anchored in full quotes on each side, and the tension is held open rather than resolved.
Seven primary texts are synthesized here, in the editions and translations the briefs were built on, placed in order of original French publication:
The Consumer Society (La société de consommation, 1970), trans. Chris Turner; For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (Pour une critique de l'économie politique du signe, 1972), trans. Charles Levin; The Mirror of Production (Le miroir de la production, 1973), trans. Mark Poster; Symbolic Exchange and Death (L'échange symbolique et la mort, 1976), trans. Iain Hamilton Grant; In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (À l'ombre des majorités silencieuses, 1978), trans. Foss, Patton, and Johnston; Simulacra and Simulation (Simulacres et simulation, 1981), trans. Sheila Faria Glaser; and The Perfect Crime (Le crime parfait, 1995), trans. Chris Turner. Full bibliographic detail, including the specific reprints the page numbers track, is at the foot of the document.
The boundary is worth stating in the negative, since this is a living document that will grow. The System of Objects (1968) sits just before the earliest text gathered here and is referenced by it; Seduction (1979) and Fatal Strategies (1983) carry the turn toward the object and the reversal of the subject that the late metaphysics depends on; the very late work continues past The Perfect Crime. Those installments, and a reception layer gathering the interpreters where they do load-bearing work, are to be folded in as the briefs are written. Where a concept here clearly opens onto one of those uncovered texts, the entry says so rather than pretending the trajectory ends in 1995.
Baudrillard's chronology is load-bearing, because when he said a thing is part of what it means. The arc runs in four movements, and the joints between them are real, but the first joint is contested by the work itself and the document holds that open rather than smoothing it.
The early work extends the critique of political economy to the world of objects and then to the sign. Consumption is reconstructed not as the appropriation of things for use but as a logic of signs and differences, a code that classifies persons and integrates society. The decisive theoretical instrument, the four logics of value and the isolation of sign-value as the operative one, is built in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Charles Levin, who translated that book, places its eleven essays between The System of Objects and The Consumer Society on one side and The Mirror of Production on the other, and resists any clean break narrative, reading the volume as the point where Western Marxism turns on itself while still working through its problematics.
The Mirror of Production turns the critique against Marxism itself, arguing that historical materialism universalizes the categories of political economy, projects production and labor onto societies and onto a human nature that never knew them, and so functions as the mirror in which capital contemplates itself rather than as its outside. This is the hinge on which the positive counter-principle becomes necessary: if the critique of the economic cannot be conducted from inside the economic, it has to be conducted from somewhere the economic excludes.
Symbolic Exchange and Death names that somewhere. Symbolic exchange, the reversible, ambivalent circulation of the gift and the counter-gift that the law of value excludes, is set against the whole regime of equivalence, and death is read as the structural cut the system labors to defer. This book also works out, in its central section, the genealogy of the three orders of simulacra. That genealogy is the documented hinge into the next movement: Simulacra and Simulation footnotes its three-order scheme back to the essay "L'ordre des simulacres" here.
The mature theory follows. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities reads the masses as the end of the social, an absorbing surface that neutralizes meaning rather than carrying it. Simulacra and Simulation states the theory of simulation in full: the generation by models of a real without origin, the precession of the model before the territory, the liquidation of every referential, and deterrence as the strategy by which the hyperreal forecloses the real. Implosion is the master figure of the period, the collapse of poles and of meaning into the mass.
The late work, of which only The Perfect Crime is gathered here so far, turns from the analysis of signs to a metaphysics of illusion and disappearance. The thesis is the murder of the real, the extermination not of appearance but of the radical illusion that was the world's native condition, carried out by the operation that makes everything visible, verifiable, and real. Objective irony, the revenge of the object, and the surgical removal of the Other belong to this phase. Seduction and Fatal Strategies, when added, will supply the turn through which the object takes over from the subject.
La société de consommation: ses mythes, ses structures, trans. Chris Turner.
Moves from description (the profusion of objects) to a theory (consumption as a code) and applies it across media, the body, leisure, and anomie, closing on the meta-claim that the consumer society is its own myth and that the critique of consumption belongs to that myth. Its recurring operation is to take a phenomenon that presents itself as natural, happiness, need, the body, free time, the smile, and show it to be a produced sign indexed to a system whose only end is its own reproduction. The governing figure, stated late, is that need is not the need for an object but the need for difference, so consumption is unlimited because difference is.
Pour une critique de l'économie politique du signe, trans. Charles Levin.
Eleven essays, not a treatise, circling one nucleus from different entries: the object, needs, fetishism, art, the auction, the media, design. The wager is that sign-exchange-value is fundamental and use-value often only its alibi, and that the commodity form and the sign form are governed by one logic. The book builds the formal apparatus the rest of the corpus runs on: the four logics of value, the bar of radical exclusion that separates the whole system of value from symbolic exchange, fetishism reread as the passion for the code, and the demolition of the media as non-communication.
Le miroir de la production, trans. Mark Poster.
A sustained polemic against Marxism's conceptual core. Labor, production, use-value, the dialectic, and the very idea of a productive human essence are shown to be the categories of political economy universalized and read back into history and nature, so that Marxism mirrors capital rather than breaking with it. The book reads primitive and feudal societies as evidence that production is not transhistorical, and it ends by displacing the political from the economic toward the symbolic, clearing the ground for the counter-principle that the next book names.
L'échange symbolique et la mort, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant.
The pivotal book. It sets symbolic exchange, reversibility, and death against the entire regime of value and equivalence, turning Mauss against Mauss, Saussure against Saussure, and Freud against Freud to recover the reversible as the form the system cannot answer. Its central section lays out the three orders of simulacra (counterfeit, production, simulation) keyed to three laws of value, and its long final movement reads death as the structural exclusion on which political economy, labor, and security are all built.
À l'ombre des majorités silencieuses, ou la fin du social, trans. Foss, Patton, and Johnston.
Four essays on the masses and the end of the social. The mass is read as a statistical residue and an absorbing surface, neither subject nor object, that soaks up meaning, the political, and the social and grounds them out. Its silence is not passivity awaiting representation but a strategy: hyperconformity, the over-fulfilment of the system's demands to the point of their collapse. The book also carries the most portable statement of media implosion and reads terrorism as the only event a system of deterrence still permits.
Simulacres et simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser.
The full theory of simulation across eighteen essays. The opening states the precession of simulacra, the map that precedes the territory and the real generated from models without origin, and the four successive phases of the image ending in the pure simulacrum that bears no relation to any reality. Deterrence is the strategy of the real: power, the social, and the nuclear all stage their own referent to forestall its disappearance. The essays test the thesis on Watergate, Disneyland, the Beaubourg, the media, cloning, and science fiction.
Le crime parfait, trans. Chris Turner.
The late metaphysics in twenty-two short chapters. The conceit is a murder mystery whose victim is the real and whose perfect crime is the extermination of the world's radical illusion by the will to make everything visible, real, and verifiable. The book turns the analysis of signs into an ontology of disappearance, develops objective irony and the revenge of the object, and reads the surgical removal of the Other, cloning, and the manufactured victim as the form a world without otherness takes.
The lexicon is the reference core. Entries are grouped in six clusters that follow the arc of the work; within a cluster, a load-bearing concept is gathered exhaustively while a minor one gets its single locus. Jump to any dossier:
The instruments of the early critique. Consumption is reconstructed as a code of differences, sign-value is isolated from the other logics of value, and need, use-value, and fetishism are each shown to be effects of the system rather than its natural ground.
The value an object carries within a code as a marker of difference and status. The founding inversion of the early theory is that this sign-exchange-value is fundamental rather than derived, so that use-value functions as its alibi and the object form completes the commodity form rather than escaping it.
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign · chapter 1, page 29
This empiricist hypothesis is false. Far from the primary status of the object being a pragmatic one which would subsequently come to overdetermine a social value of the sign, it is the sign exchange value (valeur d'échange signe) which is fundamental—use value is often no more than a practical guarantee (or even a rationalization pure and simple).
The inversion stated flatly in the opening essay, and the wager the whole volume turns on. The pragmatic object is not the ground the sign later decorates; the sign is the ground, and utility is the cover story.
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign · chapter 7, page 134
And if we call this abstract equivalence of utilities the object form, we can say that the object form is only the completed form of the commodity form. In other words, the same logic (and the same fetishism) plays on the two sides of the commodity specified by Marx: use value and exchange value.
The structural consequence. Use-value does not stand outside the commodity as its honest, pre-economic core; it is the commodity form carried through to completion, governed by the same abstraction.
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign · chapter 7, page 137
Let us say that they have a tactical value—whereas exchange value and signifier have strategic value. The system is organized along the lines of a functional but hierarchized bipolarity. Absolute preeminence redounds to exchange value and the signifier. Use value and needs are only an effect of exchange value. Signified (and referent) are only an effect of the signifier (we will return to this point later).6 Neither is an autonomous reality that either exchange value or the signifier would express or translate in their code. At bottom, they are only simulation models, produced by the play of exchange value and of signifiers. They provide the latter with the guarantee of the real, the lived, the concrete, they are the guarantee of an objective reality for which, however, in the same moment, these systems qua systems substitute their own total logic. (Even the term "substitute" is misleading, in this context. It implies the existence somewhere of a fundamental reality that the system appropriates or distorts. In fact, there is no reality or principle of reality other than that directly produced by the system as its ideal reference.) Use value and the signified do not constitute an elsewhere with respect to the systems of the other two; they are only their alibis.
The germ of everything later. Use-value and the signified are not a reality the system distorts but simulation models the system produces to guarantee itself, and there is no reality behind them. The hyperreal is already stated here, a decade before its name.
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign · chapter 5, pages 113 to 114
At this point, the field of political economy, articulated only through exchange value and use value, explodes and must be entirely reanalyzed as generalized political economy, which implies the production of sign exchange value in the same way and in the same movement as the production of material goods and of economic exchange value.
The scope claim. Sign-value is not a cultural supplement to a material economy; the production of signs and the production of goods are one process, and political economy has to be rewritten to take it in.
See also The four logics of value · The critique of use-value · The fetishism of the sign · The structural law of value
The grid that organizes the whole early project. An object can fall under four distinct logics, and the critical work consists in holding them apart, since the disciplines that house the object habitually collapse one into another.
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign · chapter 2, page 66
A functional logic of use value; 2. An economic logic of exchange value; 3. A logic of symbolic exchange; 4. A logic of sign value. The first is a logic of practical operations, the second one of equivalence, the third, ambivalence, and the fourth, difference. Or again: a logic of utility, a logic of the market, a logic of the gift, and a logic of status. Organized in accordance with one of the above groupings, the object assumes respectively the status of an instrument, a commodity, a symbol, or a sign.
The grid laid out. An object is an instrument under use-value, a commodity under exchange-value, a symbol under symbolic exchange, and a sign under sign-value. Three of the four belong to political economy. The fourth, the symbolic, is what political economy cannot hold.
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign · chapter 6, page 123
postulated four different logics of value: • the functional logic of use value • the economic logic of exchange value • the differential logic of sign value • the logic of symbolic exchange with, for their respective principles' utility, equivalence, difference, ambivalence.
The same scheme restated late in the volume, each logic now paired to its principle: utility, equivalence, difference, ambivalence. The list reorders the last two terms, with sign-value moved ahead of symbolic exchange, but the pairings are unchanged, and the purpose of the exercise holds: to keep four things the tradition runs together visibly apart.
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign · chapter 6, page 128
The bar that separates all these terms from symbolic exchange is not a bar of structural implication, it is a line of radical exclusion (which presupposes the radical alternative of transgression).
The decisive line on the grid. Between the three logics of value and symbolic exchange there is no structural bar relating the terms across it, of the kind that joins signifier to signified. There is a line of radical exclusion. The symbolic is not another value standing beside the others; it is what value as such shuts out.
See also Sign-value · Symbolic exchange · The critique of use-value · Ambivalence
The system of differences within which objects signify and through which a society communicates with itself. Consumption is not a relation between a person and a thing but the operation of this code, modeled on language and on the structuralist account of kinship.
The Consumer Society · page 79
Let us recall here the Levi-Straussian principle: what confers on consumption its character of being a social fact is not what it apparently preserves of nature (satisfaction, enjoyment/pleasure), but the essential procedure by which it breaks with nature (what defines it as a code, an institution, a system of organization). Just as the kinship system is in the last instance based not on consanguinity and filiation, on a natural datum, but on an arbitrary classification arrangement, so the system of consumption is in the last instance based not on need and enjoyment but on a code of signs (signs/objects) and differences.
The code defined by analogy to kinship. What makes consumption a social fact is not the natural satisfaction it seems to preserve but the arbitrary classification it imposes, exactly as a kinship system rests on classification rather than on blood.
The Consumer Society · pages 79 to 80
The circulation, purchase, sale, appropriation of differentiated goods and signs/objects today constitute our language, our code, the code by which the entire society communicates and converses. Such is the structure of consumption, its language [langue], by comparison with which individual needs and pleasures [jouissances] are merely speech effects.
Consumption as a language. Goods and signs are the code through which the society converses, and individual needs and pleasures are not the ground of that language but its effects, in the way a single utterance is an effect of the langue that makes it sayable.
The Consumer Society · page 94
What is politically effective is the creation not of a situation in which contradiction is replaced by equality and equilibrium, but of one in which contradiction is replaced by difference. The solution to social contradiction is not equalization, but differentiation. No revolution is possible at the level of a code — or, alternatively, revolutions take place every day at that level, but they are 'fashion revolutions', which are harmless and foil the other kind.
Why the code cannot be overturned from within. Difference has displaced contradiction, so the revolts that occur at the level of the code are fashion revolutions, which change the signs while leaving the system of differences intact and, by absorbing the appetite for change, head off revolution of the other kind.
See also Sign-value · Consumption · The smallest marginal difference · The structural law of value
Reconstructed not as the enjoyment of goods but as an activity of the sign, an idealist practice of manipulating objects as differences, unlimited in principle because it answers to meaning rather than to need.
The Consumer Society · page 61
The principle of analysis remains as follows: you never consume the object in itself (in its use-value); you are always manipulating objects (in the broadest sense) as signs which distinguish you either by affiliating you to your own group taken as an ideal reference or by marking you off from your group by reference to a group of higher status.
The definition the book turns on. One never consumes the object in its use-value; one manipulates objects as signs that place the consumer in relation to others, by affiliation to a reference group or by distinction from a lower one. Consumption is a social logic before it is a private pleasure.
The Consumer Society · page 64
There are no limits to man's 'needs' as a social being (i.e. as a being productive of meaning and relative to others in value). The quantitative intake of food is limited, the digestive system is limited, but the cultural system of food is, for its part, indefinite.
Why consumption has no saturation point. A balance sheet of calories or use-values would reach its limit quickly, but the cultural system of needs is indefinite, because what is consumed is meaning, and meaning does not fill up.
The Consumer Society · page 192
The subject of consumption is the order of signs. Whether we define this latter structurally, as the instance of a code, or empirically as the generalized ambience of objects, the involvement of the subject is no longer, at any event, that of an 'alienated' essence in the philosophical, Marxist sense of the term. It is not that of an essence which is dispossessed, taken over by some alienating agency and become foreign to itself. For there is no longer, properly speaking, any 'selfsame', any 'subject itself', or, therefore, any 'alterity of the selfsame', and therefore no alienation in the strict sense.
The conclusion that breaks with Marxist humanism. If the subject of consumption is the order of signs, then there is no prior selfsame essence being dispossessed, and so no alienation in the strict sense. The diagnosis cannot be that consumer society estranges us from our true nature, because the category of a true nature has dropped out.
See also The code · Sign-value · The smallest marginal difference · The system of needs
In Baudrillard's account no natural need precedes the system. The need for an object is always a need for difference, and the system of needs functions as the consumption-side equivalent of abstract social labor.
The Consumer Society · pages 77 to 78
we may advance the hypothesis that, if one admits that need is never so much the need for a particular object as the 'need' for difference (the desire for the social meaning), then it will be clear that there can never be any achieved satisfaction, or therefore any definition of need.
The thesis that voids the theory of needs. If the need is never for the object but for the difference it marks, then no quantity of objects could satisfy it, and need ceases to have any definition at all. There is no natural floor under consumption to which the analysis could appeal.
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign · chapter 7, page 131
In effect, our hypothesis is that needs (i.e., the system of needs) are the equivalent of abstract social labor: on them is erected the system of use value, just as abstract social labor is the basis for the system of exchange value.
The structural placing of need. As abstract social labor is the basis of exchange-value, the system of needs is the basis of use-value, which makes need not a biological given but a category produced to mirror labor on the consumption side of the equation.
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign · chapter 7, page 132
the consumer never appears as desire and enjoyment, but as abstract social need power (one could say Bedürfniskraft, Bedurfnisvermögen, by analogy with Arbeitskraft, Arbeitsvermögen).
The consumer rewritten on the model of the worker. The consumer never figures as desire or enjoyment but as abstract social need-power, a counterpart Baudrillard coins (Bedürfniskraft) on the model of Marx's labor-power, so that consumption falls under the same abstraction as production.
See also The critique of use-value · Consumption · The smallest marginal difference · The mirror of production
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