The Perfect Crime

In Poster’s introduction to Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, he observes that: “Marxism emerges in Baudrillard’s pages not as a radical critique of capitalism but as its highest form of justification or ideology” (4). The rather ironic image this brought to mind for me was an example used earlier in the semester—the Manifesto as an advertising piece promoting designer jeans. Though I’m taking this example out of context, it does to seem to illustrate Poster’s comment: Rather than inciting revolution, Marxism actually supports the system it opposes.

After reading Ken Rufo’s post, it seems to me that Baudrillard’s insights into Marxism may be among his most immediately accessible concepts. What he’s saying about Marxism, in other words, is that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Marxism is essentially starting from the same premise as capitalism—the primacy of production—with different motivations. What neither capitalism or communism have articulated, according to Baudrillard, is that the real key to the whole system is consumerism. And this is where he begins to bring in Saussure, linguistic theories of reality, exchange value, and ultimately, the value of illusion (see below for an awesome quote on Baudrillard, media, and illusion).

Although it is not addressed in Rufo’s post, from my other readings it seems generally acknowledged that not all of Baudrillard’s work was of the same caliber. His later work, in particular, attempted to address vastly complex political/historical situations, with varying degrees of accuracy and even acceptance among scholars. I was very interested to find that, although he explains rather convincingly the limitations of Marxist theory, when Baudrillard applied his own theoretical concepts to actual political situations (such as the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and later, terrorism and 9-11), he seems to have often missed the mark himself. As I read through the extremely negative piece written after his death (posted as a comment after Rufo’s post), I couldn’t help but think Baudrillard would have to have expected to take some flack for pointing out other theorists’ flaws, and then proceeding to publish such controversial work himself.

A closing quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which I found interesting and seemed so appropriate to this blog: “Baudrillard claims that the negation of a transcendent reality in the current media and technological society is a ‘perfect crime’ that involves the ‘destruction of the real.’ In a world of appearance, image, and illusion, Baudrillard suggests, reality disappears although its traces continue to nourish an illusion of the real.” (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/#4)

Until next time,
H.