Beyond Habermas: Rethinking Critical Theories of Communication
6.3. Cultural Reductionism: Jean Baudrillard 1. Baudrillard against Marx
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ing. Money communicates commodity prices on the market. Money is the form of communication that facilitates the abstract equalisation of commodi-ties on the market in the exchange process. Marx therefore speaks of value as the ‘language of commodities’:
We see, then, that everything our analysis of the value of commodities previously told us is repeated by the linen itself, as soon as it enters into association with another commodity, the coat; Only it reveals its thoughts in a language with which it alone is familiar, the language of commodities. In order to tell us that labour creates its own value in its abstract quality of being human labour, it says that the coat, in so far as it counts as its equal, i.e. is value, consists of the same labour as it does itself. In order to inform us that its sublime objectivity as a value differs from its stiff and starchy existence as a body, it says that value has the appearance of a coat, and therefore that in so far as the linen itself is an object of value [Wertding], it and the coat are as like as two peas. Let us note, incidentally, that the language of commodities also has, apart from Hebrew, plenty of other more or less correct dia-lects. The German word ‘Wertsein’ (to be worth), for instance, brings out less strikingly than the Romance verb ‘valere’, ‘valer’, ‘valoir’ that the equating of commodity B with commodity A is the expression of value proper to commodity A. Paris vaut bien une messe! (Marx 1867, 143–144).
In Marx’s equation (20 yards of linen = 1 coat = 2 ounces of gold), money has the role that it makes commodities commensurable and comparable in the exchange process by communicating prices. Marx, other than Sohn-Rethel, saw money as a peculiar form of economic communication.
6.3. Cultural Reductionism: Jean Baudrillard
superstructure cannot explain the radical novel logic of the sign, the symbolic realm, culture, and language. Marxism ‘never challenges human capacity of production’ (Baudrillard 1975, 31) and would celebrate labour. It would dis-regard ‘non-work or play’ (Baudrillard 1975, 38). The Marxist understanding of social wealth as material ‘has nothing to do with symbolic wealth’ (Baudril-lard 1975, 42–43). Whereas labour would put something into value, the sym-bol would put something into play (Baudrillard 1975, 44). The ‘real rupture’ is
‘between symbolic exchange and work (production, economics)’ (Baudrillard 1975, 45).
Marxism would focus on nature as the reality in the economic process (Baudrillard 1975, 54). For Baudrillard, society has been transformed so radi-cally by the importance of the sign, that Marxism is no longer an adequate means for understanding reality. In the symbolic realm, the distinctions between producer/product, producer/user, producer/labour-power, users/
needs and product/utility (Baudrillard 1975, 102–103) would become blurred.
So for example in language, there would be no separation between producers and consumers (Baudrillard 1975, 97). Also the distinction between base and superstructure would break down (Baudrillard 1975, 118).
6.3.2. The Material and the Immaterial
The ‘Marxist theory of production is irredeemably partial, and cannot be generalized. Or again: the theory of production […] is strictly homogeneous with its object – material production – and is non-transferable, as a postu-late or theoretical framework, to contents that were never given for it in the first place’ (Baudrillard 1981, 165). One implication of Baudrillard’s approach is that he draws a boundary between the material and the immaterial. It is therefore no surprise that in another work he says: ‘The content of the mes-sages, the signifieds of the signs are largely immaterial. We are not engaged in them, and the media do not involve us in the world, but offer for our con-sumption signs as signs, albeit signs accredited with the guarantee of the real’
(Baudrillard 1998, 34).
Baudrillard argues that Marxism is a productivism that frames the whole world in the language of production and disregards symbolic exchange. But he overlooks the dynamic nature of the world: everything that exists must come into existence. It is produced. The world is not static, but is at some level of organisation always in movement. Even if things at one level remain the same, they can only do so because of underlying changes. Reproduction requires and reproduces production, and production produces reproduction. Communica-tion and signs do not simply exist, but need to be produced and reproduced.
Communication is not a form of exchange, but humans’ social production of shared meanings through which they interpret each other and the natural, social, economic, technical, political and cultural world.
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Baudrillard basically argues that the economy and production are material, whereas culture and consumption are for him immaterial. The most basic ques-tion that philosophy and indeed also religion ask is: What is the world? Why does it exist? How does it exist? There can either be one or several fundamental substances that the world is made of and through which it transforms itself. If there is more than one, then there must be some causal relation between them.
If one assumes that a spiritual substance (such as God) either exists besides and outside of matter or determines matter, then the world cannot be explained in the first instance because the question arises: who created the God-like spirit?
If we in contrast assume that matter is the process-substance of the world, is its own cause (causa sui), and has the capacity to produce and organise itself, then a different explanation of the world becomes possible: The world is mat-ter-in-process that produces itself, is its own origin, and has the capacity to produce new organisational levels. Such reasoning also implies that there is no God because any assumption of the existence of God is an over-specification of theory that is unnecessary. Separating mind from matter, as Baudrillard does, cannot adequately explain the world’s origin and development.
The human brain is a material system connected to the human body. A human’s semiosis ceases when s/he dies. S/he can then no longer interpret the world and give meaning to it. We cannot see thoughts, but they are tied to a material sub-stratum (the brain) that makes them material. They are intangible and non-phys-ical, but material. We can also materialise thoughts in the form of textual, visual, audio, audio-visual forms that are stored in some material. The immaterial does not exist. Information is a specific form of matter. It is real and material, although it is more often non-physical and intangible than physical and tangible.
6.3.3. Sign Value as Replacement, Collapse and Abolition of Economic Value
Baudrillard does not, as for example Habermas, dualistically separate the eco-nomic and the symbolic, but rather reduces labour and the ecoeco-nomic to the sign and culture. Sign value would replace economic value, symbolic manipula-tion would replace exploitamanipula-tion:
It is a matter of the passage of all values to exchange-sign value, under the hegemony of the code. […] [The sign] is an operational structure that tends itself to a structural manipulation compared with which the quantitative mystery of surplus value appears inoffensive. The super-ideology of the sign […] has replaced good old political economy as the theoretical basis of the system (Baudrillard 1975, 121–122).
The sign would have become the hegemonic reality. ‘The sign no longer desig-nates anything at all. […] All reality then becomes the place of a semi-urgical
manipulation, of a structural simulation’ (Baudrillard 1975, 128). All reality has for Baudrillard become symbolic. The economic would collapse into the symbolic: the ‘structural configuration of value simply and simultaneously puts an end to the regimes of production, political economy, representation and signs. With the code, all this collapses into simulation’ (Baudrillard 1993, 8).
Production would collapse into culture and consumption: ‘The entire sphere of production, labour and the forces of production must be conceived as collaps-ing into the sphere of “consumption”, understood as the sphere of a generalised axiomatic, a coded exchange of signs, a general lifestyle’ (Baudrillard 1993, 14).
The economy and politics would turn into hyperreality: ‘the two spheres are abolished in another reality or media hyperreality’ (Baudrillard 1993, 65).
When Baudrillard speaks of replacement, collapse and abolition, then he means that the whole world today is symbolic, cultural, and ideological. There is for him outside to the world of signification. Signification is for Baudrillard the world. Baudrillard claims that Marxism is a theoretical imperialism of the economy. His theoretical answer to Marxism is a cultural imperialism that dis-solves everything into the world of signs, the media, communication, language, thought, and consumption. By rejecting Marxism he turns against materialism and aims to revive philosophical idealism. The social world is in human soci-ety always at the same time economic, political and cultural: all social systems have resources, decision-making mechanisms, and social meanings. Society and social systems can never be dissolved into pure information. A university is a social system, in which non-information resources (buildings, classroom furniture, food and drinks in the cafeteria, etc.) and informational resources (teachers and students’ knowledge and skills, books in the library, research databases, etc.) form an economy, specific rules determine the institution’s poli-tics, and certain pedagogical and research norms shape its culture. Researchers and students together in this economic, political and cultural environment pro-duce systematic knowledge about the world. This is not simply possible because of pre-existing information, but also because of a diverse infrastructure.
6.3.4. Why Communication is Not Symbolic Exchange
Baudrillard argues that the mass media are not real media because they do not enable responses and reciprocity. They are ‘anti-mediatory and intransitive’
and ‘fabricate non-communication’ (Baudrillard 1981, 169). He defines com-munication in this context as ‘a reciprocal space of a speech and a response, and thus of a responsibility […] We must understand communication as some-thing other than the simple transmission reception of a message’ (Baudrillard 1981, 169). Mass media would make ‘all processes of exchange impossible’
(Baudrillard 1981, 170). It is paradoxical that Baudrillard argues that the media world eliminates the economy, but at the same time uses the term ‘exchange’
for describing communication’s essence. The modern use of the English term
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exchange and the French term échanger goes back to the late fourteenth century and took on the meaning of barter and mercantile business.5 So the terms are in both languages in modern times bound up with markets and the commodity form x commodity A = y commodity B, in which a certain amount of one com-modity is exchanged for a certain amount of another one.
When we form sentences or speak with others, we do not perform measure-ments and do not weigh one word or sentence against another word or sen-tence in a quantitative manner. Money has the role of expressing and represent-ing the amount of average labour objectified in commodities so that they can be exchanged. It quantifies the value of commodities. Human language is funda-mentally different from money. It is first and foremost qualitative in character, it has certain general rules agreed by custom over hundreds of years (syntax), operates with meanings of combinations of symbols (semantics), and is used in specific contexts that interact with meanings (pragmatics). It is a combina-tion of linguistic form and structure, social interpretacombina-tion, and societal effects.
Language does not function based on the logic x commodity A = y money M.
Its essence is that it is qualitative and transcends the logic of measurement.
This does, however, not mean that the products of labour cannot be turned into commodities. In commodity-producing societies, the access to linguistic products can certainly be commodified, which then results in exchange-rela-tionships and measurements such as: 1 hour of psychological consultation =
£60, 1 hour of financial advice = £100, entry to 1 theatre performance = £12.50, translation costs per word a text = £0.1, etc. Communication as such is alien to the commodity form. It can in a capitalist society, however, be force-fit into measurements such as 1 linguistic unit = £y.
Baudrillard is a prototypical representative of a cultural reductionism that reduces and dissolves labour and production into culture and sign systems.