Essays on baudrillard

This historical context of his writing had a significant influence on Baudrillard’s understanding and analysis of consumption (Kellner, 1989). It was this new social formation that Baudrillard understood as ‘The Consumer Society’.

Baudrillard’s attempts to merge the Marxist critique of capitalist society with studies on consumption, fashion, media, sexuality and the consumer society could be understood as an attempt to update Marxist thought in light of developments occurring in France in the 1960s (Fine, 2002, p. 57).

In the logic of the first category, the object becomes an instrument, in the second, a commodity, in the third, a symbol, and in the fourth, a sign (Baudrillard 1981a: 66). With his semiotic writings on the object, Baudrillard, now following Saussure and the structuralists, endeavours to show that no object exists in isolation from others.

Baudrillard’s earliest writings on Calvino, and others published in Sartre’s, Les Temps modernes, together with his translations of Brecht and Weiss hardly presage the explosive critique of Marx’s theory of value that would emerge less than a decade later. Quite unlike Lefebvre, Baudrillard did not reject structuralism; he rather worked through it.