Ideology and Difference

Abstract

There is, as I have said, an irreproachable logic to Baudrillard’s thought: for if it is the case that the transition from third to fourth order simulation is marked by the erasure of the ostensive power of the sign, and if it is that loss which opens the regime of capital up to the exorbitant forms of production, consumption and self-identification which characterize the hyperreal, then Baudrillard’s later writing provides a comprehensive account of the complicity between capitalism, the media and postmodern culture. Thus, if we are prepared to accompany Baudrillard to the logical conclusion of his thesis, we are left with the endless multiplication of simulacra, none of which have any value beyond their solicitation of particular, contingent effects within the resistive body of the masses. Ultimately the only political response to the loss of the real which is not itself a simulation, consists in registering the ‘return of the repressed’ which afflicts every system of undifferentiated identity; that is, the registration of the extreme phenomena which reveal the irrecuperable presence of death within the weightlessness of the hyperreal. The question which arises here, of course, is whether the hermetic system which Baudrillard describes has actually succeeded in evacuating ‘the real’ from the social relationships we inhabit. The answer to this question, I will argue, is not the simple negative which emanates from conventional Marxist and structuralist thought.