baudrillard, jean - selected writings_ok.pdf - Baudrillard - MKTK

Acknowledgments

Permission has been granted for the reprinting or translation of the

following works of Baudrillard.

*Le Système des objets (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), pp. 255-83.

*La Société de consommation (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), pp. 17-26,

93-123.

For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles

Levin (St Louis: Telos Press, 1981, original publication, 1972),

pp. 130-63.

The Mirror of Production, trans. Mark Poster (St Louis: Telos Press,

1975, original publication, 1973), pp. 21-51, 111-29.

*L'Echange symbolique et la mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1976),

pp. 19-29, and "Symbolic Exchange and Death," trans. Charles

Levin in The Structural Allegory, ed. John Fekete, Theory and

History of Literature, vol. 11 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1984), pp. 54-73.

*De la seduction (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1979), pp. 75-92, 107-15,

241-3.

Simulacra and Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip

Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983, original publication,

1981), pp. 1-13, 23-49.

*Les Stratégies fatales (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1983), pp. 9-33,

259-73.

"The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media," trans.

Marie Maclean, New Literary History, vol. 16, no. 3 (Spring 1985),

pp. 577-89.

* Designates new translation from the French, by Jacques Mourrain.

Acknowledgments

vii

Douglas Kellner kindly reviewed my selections and made valuable

suggestions. His book, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Post-

modernism and Beyond, forthcoming, has a good bibliography of

works by and on Baudrillard. Helen Tartar, my editor at Stanford,

initiated this project, took on some of the duties often done by the

volume editor, and encouraged me through its completion.

Notes on the Translation

Words that appear in English in Baudrillard's original text, a practice

that becomes increasingly prevalent in his writings, have been noted

as such. Baudrillard rarely provides full citations in his own notes.

The editor and translators have attempted to complete the citation,

but in some cases this has proven impossible. At times Baudrillard

cites French translations of English or American works which are

unavailable in the United States. At other times Baudrillard's

quotations have not been located anywhere in the text he cites.

[Trans.] indicates a translator's addition to the notes.

Introduction

Mark Poster

Baudrillard has developed a theory to make intelligible one of the

fascinating and perplexing aspects of advanced industrial society:

the proliferation of communications through the media. This new

language practice differs from both face-to-face symbolic exchange

and print. The new media employ the montage principle of

film (unlike print) and time-space distancing[1] (unlike face-to-face

conversation) to structure a unique linguistic reality. Baudrillard

theorizes from the vantage point of the new media to argue that a

new culture has emerged, one that is impervious to the old forms

of resistance and impenetrable by theories rooted in traditional

metaphysical assumptions. Culture is now dominated by simulations,

Baudrillard contends, objects and discourses that have no firm origin,

no referent, no ground or foundation. In this sense, what Walter

Benjamin wrote about "the age of mechanical reproduction," 2

Baudrillard applies to all reaches of everyday life.

Baudrillard began his writing with The System of Objects (1968)

and Consumer Society (1970) as an effort to extend the Marxist

critique of capitalism to areas that were beyond the scope of the

theory of the mode of production. He gradually abandoned Marxism,

a process that is traced in the pages of this volume, developing his

position along lines that have affinities with post-structuralists like

Foucault and Derrida. Baudrillard found that the productivist

metaphor in Marxism was inappropriate for comprehending the

status of commodities in the post-war era. Only a semiological

model, he argues, can decipher the meaning structure of the

modern commodity. But the commodity embodies a communicational

structure that is a departure from the traditional understanding of

the sign. In a commodity the relation of word, image or meaning

and referent is broken and restructured so that its force is directed,

not to the referent of use value or utility, but to desire.

Like the post-structuralists, Baudrillard rejects traditional assump-

baudrillard, jean - selected writings_ok.pdf

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