Thoughts on Ken Rufo's Baudrillard : Marxism and the "impossible exchange"

In his post, Ken Rufo points out the supposedly contracting nature of Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernist ideology. Says Rufo: “People say he was a postmodernist, whatever that means, but he repeatedly disavowed the label and said that he was actually arguing against postmodernism.” Because Baudrillard identifies with other ideologies, such as Marxism, the guest blog post paint’s Baudrillard’s beliefs as being illegitimate.

It becomes important to understand that postmodernist theory is not a sequel to modernism; while some of the aspects between the two are similar, postmodernist theory should be regarded as a separate entity from its predecessor. Modernism and Postmodernism are both interested on the fragmentation of reality. However, unlike modernism, postmodernist theorists embrace this fragmentation.

Baudrillard maintains that mass imagery brings a universal language and a system of belief to a culture where consumerism is a way of life. The imagery found in commercials, advertisements and film reinforce this way of life, telling us what it means to be a part of the “modern world”. Postmodernist theorist Jean Baudrillard uses the term “the loss of the real” to describe how images created by the mass media become more than what they represent.

Baudrillard’s postmodern views could easily be misinterpreted as an allegory about the media’s responsibility in influencing the American culture’s obsession with materialism and consumption. This is why it appears that he “begins as a Marxist”.

Says Rufo: “Sometime later…Baudrillard sets out to explain how the commodity can be understood as a sign in and of itself, and vice versa, how the sign is understood as a form of commodity logic.”

The criticism of a culture for placing too much value on goods or services is known as Marxism. According to Marx, a culture that places collective value on material items is devaluing social equality and preventing people from forming genuine relationships with each other. Baudrillard agrees with this, stating that recurrent media images take on a hyperreality. That is, our mental images have been created through our constant exposure to recycled media deceptions.

However, Baudrillard’s explanation of this relationship disputes Marxism. Baurdillard is saying that this relationship between signs and commodity is necessary in American culture, because it shapes our understanding of the world.

As for Ken Ruffo's discussion and illustration of Baudrillard's orders of illustration, they interestingly lead to the very intriguing idea of "impossible exchange". The continual deferring of reality, does not continue infinitely, as Saussure would say, but finally hits a wall past which meaning cannot be deferred. Thus reality refuses to be explained or theorized into language, manifesting itself in the very rare form of the unexplained, the unfathomable. Baudrillard says that the more we defer meaning the more likely we are to hit this wall, and it seems to me that an instance of this is the state of genetics today.

After the project of the human genome was realized and the entire genetic map of the human being was produced, scientists have found more anomalies and irregularities than they have found patterns. They have found more exceptions to what they thought the rule was , than rules themselves. It looks like in genetics- where meaning was quickly being deferred further and further still, and scientists and non-scientists had the feeling that they were getting closer and closer to real knowledge- finally hit a wall where exchange of meaning value was no longer possible, the wall past which exchange is impossible.