BAUDRILLARD

Baudrillard(1929-2005), was a French sociologist ,philosopher ,political commentator ,and photographer .His work is associated with postmodernism and post structuralism .His main interests were in mass media and post modernity .A sharp critic of contemporary society, culture and thought. He was born in cathedral town of Reims, France .According to Gane (1993) he told interviewers that his grandparents and his parents became civil servants. Baudrillard also claims that he was the first member of his family to pursue an advanced education and that this led to rapture with his parents and cultural milieu. His notable ideas were on hyper reality, sign value and simulacra.
Baudriallard’ s published work emerged as part of a generation of French thinkers including Gilles Deleuze,Jean- Francois Lyotard ,Foucault ,Derrida and Lacon who all shared an interest in semiotics and he is often seen as a part of post structuralist philosophical school .In common with many post structuralists ,his arguments consistently draw upon the notion that signification and meanings are both only understandable in terms of how particular words or signs interrelate .Baudrillard thought ,as do many post structuralists that meaning ,is brought about through systems of signs working together .In contrast to post structuralists such as Foucault, for whom the formation of knowledge emerge only as the result of power, Baudrillard developed theories in which the excessive , fruitless search for total knowledge lead almost inevitably to a kind of delusion.
According to Ritzer (2008), amongst the postmodern social theorists, Baudrillard is one of the most radical and outrageous of this genre. His earliest work going to the 1960s both modernist and Marxian in its orientation .This is evidenced by the fact that his early works involved a Marxist critique at the consumer society .Thus according to Kellner (1989), Baudrillard’s work was influenced by linguistics and semiotics and he goes on to say that it should be viewed as a “a semiological supplement to Marx’s theory of political economy”. However ,Baudrillard seem to have ended up criticizing and ultimately left it behind .In his work entitled The Mirror of Production ,Baudrillard(1973) come to view the Marxian perspective as some sort of mirror image of conservative political economy. In Baudrillard’s view Marx was influenced by the “virus of bourgeoisie thought” because for Marx’s approach was infused with conservative ideas such as “work’’ and value and so Baudrillard was coming in with a more radical orientation.
Baudrillard’s theory of a new postmodern society rest on key assumption that the media and simulations constitute a new realm of experience and a new stage of history and type of society. To a larger extent, Baudrillard’s theory consists of rethinking radical social theory and politics in the light of developments of the consumer, media, information and technological society. Baudrillard’s work focuses on the construction of the consumer society and how it provides a new world of values ,meaning ,activity and thus inhibit the terrain of Marxism and political economy .In consumer societies socialization takes place through institutions of mental training that is the media and this is simply a form of social control .Baudrillard was mainly fascinated by the constraints of the consumer society for example recycling or signs ,fashion flavors of the moment ,combinatory possibilities of which are predetermined by the models of which consumers conform .Commodities are an expression and a mark of style ,prestige luxury and power for example , Baudrillard noted how the television object was becoming a center of the household and was serving an essential ‘proof function’ that the owner was a genuine member of the consumer society. Therefore, the prestigious one’s commodity is for instance cars, clothes; the high one’s standing is the realm of sign value is. Baudrillard also notes that, in a society where everything is a commodity that can be bought and sold, alienation is total. He also describes a situation where alienation is total that it cannot be surpassed because it is the very structure of market society .However, he distinguishes himself from the Marxist theory of revolution and instead postulate only the possibility of revolt against the consumer society
Baudrillard , talks of simulacra and simulation to interrogate the relationship among reality ,symbols and society .Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no reality to begin with ,or that no longer have an original .Simulation is the imitation of the operation of the real world process or system over time .Baudrillard claims that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs and that human experience of a simulation of reality. Moreover ,these simulacra are not merely mediations of reality they are not based in a reality ,nor do they hide a reality ,they simply hide that anything like reality is relevant to our current understanding of our lives .The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are the significations and symbolism of culture and media that construct perceived reality ,the acquires understanding by which our lives and shared existence are legible.
Baudrillard’s concept of symbolic exchange represents an important concept in understanding why Marx’s prediction regarding the collapse of capitalism has not been realised. Thus Baudrillard was interested in the question of how capitalism has continued to sustain itself amidst abundance. In order to explain this Baudrillard introduces the notion of ―symbolic exchange or ―sign exchange. Sign exchange is a process in which goods are exchanged as commodities, but with the new element of symbolic value, or status, they provide the consumer. Symbolic value presents a new explanatory tool in the discussion of value and is designed to augment the explanatory power of use value and exchange value in a consumption oriented society (Baudrillard 1981, 123-29).
Baudrillard adds to the Marxian concepts of use value and exchange value. He is of the suggestion that in today’s consumer-oriented society commodities take on symbolic value that constitutes their status and therefore power. Thus in today’s world power and status are being defined by for example the kind of car you drive rather than in Marx view, power and status comprise of one’s access to the means of production. Furthermore Baudrillard champions symbolic exchange as an alternative against modern demands to produce value and meaning .There also rapture with forms of exchange of goods, meaning and libidinal energies and thus case escape from the forms of production capitalism rationality and meaning ( Koch and Elmore 2006).That is the "global" world operates at the level of the exchange of signs and commodities, it becomes ever more blind to symbolic acts such as, for example, terrorism. In Baudrillard's work the symbolic realm (which he develops a perspective on through the anthropological work of Mauss and Bataille is seen as quite distinct from that of signs and signification. Signs can be exchanged like commodities; symbols, on the other hand, operate quite differently: they are exchanged, like gifts, sometimes violently as a form of potlatch.

In Western industrial societies that are networked into information cultures the generation of symbolic value results from a constantly changing symbolic environment in which new demands for access to symbolic status are generated. Consequently, with the emergence of the Industrial Revolution, the original is replaced by the logic of the ―series. Serial reproduction is, for Baudrillard, a revolution (Baudrillard 1983, 99). In reproduction, the techniques of production are the sole determiner of an objects use and exchange value. In this logic there is, according to Baudrillard, no longer a need for the distinction, which Marx makes between use value and exchange value, for both are lost in the equivalence generated by the techniques of reproducibility.
In his work on the ecstasy of communication ,Baudrillard describes the media as an instruments of obscenity ,transparency and ecstasy .He claims that in the postmodern mediascape ,the domestic scene or in private sphere per se with its rules, rituals and privacy is exteriorized ,or made explicit and transparent where most intimate process of our life become the virtual feeding ground of the media. In the entire universe all the useless information that comes to you like a microscopic pornography of the universe ,useless excessive just like the sexual close up in a porno film .All this explodes the scene formerly preserved by the minimal separation of public and private ,the scene that was played in a restricted space .Baudrillard also sees communication and sociality being corrupted into sign values to be consumed .This occurs through the consumption of services based on sociability. The loss of genuine spontaneous ,reciprocal human relations is covered by the standardized production of signs of social warmth and participation for example the smile of the salesman ,receptionist or public relations executive or the have a nice day of McDonald’s simulates intimacy. Baudrillard in his analysis also discussed issues to do with America .It is the place where simulation and the production of the fetish have reached its zeruth. According to Chomsky(1994),America has 5% of the world’s population yet it consumes 40% of the world’s goods .Here the notion of symbolic exchange becomes an important explanatory tool for understanding conditions of late capitalism .Baudrillard speaks of shopping as participating in a feast nowadays shopping has replaced the medieval Christian celebration of religious feast days for example ,the feast of Christmas is now a place to start thinking about shopping ,clothes ,appliances and toiletries.

Merrin argued that, Baudrillard’s position on semiotic analysis of meaning denies himself his own position on symbolic exchange .Merrin thus alludes to the common criticism of structuralist and poststructuralist work (a criticism not dissimilar in either Baudrillard ,Foucalt or Deleuzel that emphasizing interrelation as the basis for subjectivity denies the human agency from which social structures necessarily arise . According to Ritzer (2008), Baudrillard fails to define key terms such as the code, his writing style is hyperbolic and declarative ,often lacking sustained ,systematic analysis when it is appropriate ,he totalizes his insights ,refusing to qualify or delimit his claims.

REFERENCES
Baudrillard, Jean. 1993. The Transparency Of Evil, Trans. James Benedict. Verso: New York.
Poster .M.(1988), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Cambridge; UK Koch, A. M. and Elmore R.(2006), Simulation and Symbolic Exchange: Jean Baudrillard‘s Augmentation of Marx‘s Theory of Value‖ Politics and Policy 34 (3) 556-575
Ritzer .G.(2008), Modern Sociological Theory ,7th Edition ,McGraw Hill, Higher Education New York
Shirji I.G (2009), Accumulation in an African periphery.