Against Simulation: The Early Works of Jean Baudrillard

Becoming an author is a really hard job. Publishing a book is even harder. Even today. Not until you can become ignorant of your own text and read it over and over again, the true character of the text will emerge. My thesis on Baudrillard’s early works is now available (in German) featuring in-depth explorations of the Marxist and Semiotic treatises, McLuhans heritage, and Baudrillard in the context of Durkheim’s distinction of profane and sacred practices and Weber’s disenchantment of the modern world.

Chapters feature:

• Baudrillard in Media and Cultural Criticism: Against Simulation
• From Symbolic to Semiotic Cultures: Collective Representations – Rationality of Literacy and Individualization
• Alienation and Symbolic Exchange: Barthes’ Modern Myths – The Objects and Consumer Society – Need for Difference – Symbolic Exchange
• The Test of the Mass Media and Telematic Subjects: Parole sans réponse and Implosion – The Screen and Telematic Subjects
• Symbolic Exchange in (online) social networks

Graphic concept and typo composition by Katharina Berndt (gluecklichebilder.de). Editor: Jakob F. Dittmar. Available from University Press of Technical University Berlin, Kiepert, or Amazon.de or as a free download of the complete pdf from the publisher.

Theory – 学説 – Theory

The cover image was taken on the streets of Ginza, Tokyo. I wish it was a montage but actually it was all there. “Longchamp” of “Paris” next to a Barbra Streisand-looking girl featuring fashion by “Theory”. What struck me most is the combination of such disparate elements as pure signs. Maybe it takes a long way to Japan to discover this self-referentiality of the sign and the image. The cultural difference aside, it teaches a lesson in Baudrillardian thinking. And maybe theory is not so far away from fashion anyway.

Baudrillard and Symbolic Exchange

This is my Master’s Thesis on the writings of French sociologist Jean Baudrillard with
special emphasis on his concept of “symbolic exchange“. Largely known as a media
philosopher with a unique style of language and thinking, Baudrillard became famous
with the term simulation – a cultural state where media make for a sign-saturated,
hyperreal environment, where reality is lost. This paper argues that simulation has been
misinterpreted on the grounds of a Platonic phallacy in the discourse around Baudrillard
in the postmodernism debate. Instead, this paper traces Baudrillard’s roots in Emile
Durkheim’s investigations of „collective representations“ and religion among primitive
peoples. Durkheim’s writings on the primitive is presented alongside the media theory of
Marshal McLuhan and his followers as an important background for Baudrillard.
The paper traces Baudrillards windy road to simulation from his earlier writings on
consumerism, across his critique of Semiotics and Marxism to the crucial concept of
critical reversal called „symbolic exchange“. In an attempt to circumvent the
epistemological “desert of the real“ this paper argues that “symbolic exchange“can be
employed as a useful concept to analyse networked communication on the basis of
voluntary and reciprocal human relations. The paper includes references to a large body
of secondary literature and in-depth explorations of Baudrillard’s idiosyncratic
vocabulary.

I offer the complete file for download under a by-nc-nd licence here. Comments, remarks and requests for partial translations are welcome. The file is as yet only available in German.

Baudrillard and Symbolic Exchange