Neoliberalism involves significant state interventions in the economic, social, and cultural spheres—but not in the way embraced by classic liberals and socialists (external planning and administration); neoliberalism instead bases its legitimation on the myth that institutions that escape the rigors of the market and competition induce a new serfdom. This article examines, through the writings of Jean Baudrillard on the cultural logics of neoliberalism as implosion, transpoliticization, and catastrophe, the thesis that neoliberalism marks not the high point of capitalism but the crucial break with capitalism, one that produces a new and ironic totalitarianism of means not ends and a new kind of serfdom not envisaged by neoliberals. The article suggests, however, that Baudrillard’s theorizing occludes important aspects of neoliberalism.
It was man’s submission to the impersonal forces of the market that in the past has made possible the growth of a civilization which without this could not have developed; it is by thus submitting that we are every day helping to build something that is greater than anyone of us can fully comprehend.
— F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
The global liberal order clearly presents itself as the best of all possible worlds; its modest rejection of utopia ends with the imposition of its own market-liberal utopia which will supposedly become reality when we subject ourselves fully to the mechanisms of the market and universal human rights. Behind all this lurks the ultimate totalitarian nightmare, the vision of a New Man who has left behind all the old ideological baggage.
— Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times
Benjamin Noys has noted that Jean Baudrillard’s critique of Michel Foucault in the 1970s pointed to the fact that deregulated capital unleashes a “compulsion towards liquidity, flow and accelerated circulation” (quoted in Baudrillard 1987: 25) and that Foucault’s famous lectures on neoliberalism may have been, at one level, a kind of response to this critique (Noys 2012; see also Audier 2012b: 25–27). Foucault formulated his question as how to understand the way economic theory came to see the market as constituting “a site of veridiction… a site of verification-falsification for governmental practice” ([2004] 2010: 32), and he saw neoliberalism not as a return to simple “laissez-faire” but the creation of something quite new, the penetration of this new market veridiction throughout society. Baudrillard nowhere discusses the theoretical work of the Nobel Prize winners of the 1970s, F. A. Hayek (in 1974) and Milton Friedman (in 1976), their radical doctrines, or their rise to preeminence in economics and politics. Yet he clearly marked its arrival.1 What he did notice was quite different—an associated nonradicalism. As an explicit label, neoliberalism came to his attention in the 1980s with the appearance of the “yuppie”: “The softening of thought began with open-heart ideology: the New Philosophers. It continued with the New Romantics. The revival of philosophy in general. Then the euphoria of new enterprise and new business. The social ‘naturalism’ of neoliberalism. Everywhere face-lifted values have reinstalled themselves, a touching dynamism, a puerile religiosity, in which love resurfaces blithely” (1990b: 225). Baudrillard was a close observer of neoliberal phenomena and not just those close to money (224). Over three decades, from this quick characterization of the sentimental yuppie to the entrepreneurial neoliberal individual to the new world order, he was a witness to neoliberalism as an interlacing of new, and increasingly strange, contrary logics.2
The kind of world that began to emerge with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and that marked something quite new—as they themselves proclaimed and as was widely recognized at the time—involved an important shift: “This transformation of spontaneous confidence into paradoxical confidence and an achieved utopia into an imaginary hyperbole seems to me to mark a decisive turning point” (Baudrillard 1988: 114). In France, around the same time, Baudrillard followed closely the Mitterrand experiment and noticed a similar neoliberal logic within a socialist frame as the French state itself adapted to this form, in which the “fiction of the economy’s jurisdiction can become all-powerful” (2001: 117). It is at this point—which is interesting, in view of his awareness of the penetration of neoliberalism—that Baudrillard refers to the advertising campaign of a bank (the Banque Nationale de Paris): “Your money interests me—Give, Give—Bring me your money, and you will profit from my bank” ([1974] 2006: 209), but now thematically absorbed by the Mitterrand regime, as if it said to its public: “Your ideas interest us” (Baudrillard 1985a: 79, 2001: 117), expressing not just a shift in power relations but the emergence of a new cynical ambience of power. After the euphoria of the consumer society, a new formation, in various guises in different countries, began to appear in the politics of the 1980s. Yet it was the “the Right which (reaped) the fruits of this disaffection,” since the Left “proved incapable of speaking for the indifference and inertia of the social body” ([1995] 2002: 81). We might say that Baudrillard provided a theory of the consumer society, then of neoliberalization, and then of the neoliberal world itself, which puts an end to the capitalist mode of production and social formation as such. In this new world, the concepts previously used to analyze capitalism inhibit lucid analysis.3
The Elusiveness of Neoliberalism
At the end of the 1930s, Marcel Mauss admitted that the theorists had not anticipated the emergence of fascism—“that modern societies could be made to turn around like children in a ring” (1992: 214). In 1938, in Paris, two different seminar series were taking place. One was the Collège de Sociologie, initiated by Georges Bataille and Roger Caillois (see Hollier 1988), the other was the Walter Lippman Colloque (see Audier 2012a). The latter gave rise to the main groupings of neoliberal intellectuals, by no means of a single voice, from Raymond Aron to F. A. Hayek, who attempted to revive liberalism by reworking it in either economic or political theory. For a long time, the extreme Hayekian wing was regarded as either an “inverted Marxism” (Aron) or simply “eccentric” (Anthony Giddens)—indeed so eccentric it seemed to the new Left in the 1960s that Hayekian theory was not taken seriously. Wolfgang Streeck notes that “Frankfurt crisis theory was not prepared” for its eventual triumphal arrival (2014: 30), and the well-known analysis of the contours of British intellectual life by Perry Anderson ([1968] 1992) ignored both Herbert Spencer of the nineteenth and Hayek in the twentieth in a manner that today seems quite astonishing. It seems possible to say today that, rather like Mauss at the end of the 1930s faced with fascism, social theory simply did not have the new radical fact of neoliberalism on its horizon, and when it arrived had no means of dealing with it except either an academicized Marxism (reworked from Antonio Gramsci, Leon Trotsky, and Vladimir Lenin, or the Frankfurt School) or the cultural critique of postmodernism, or a combination of the two, as can be found in the work of Fredric Jameson (see Kellner 1989). Anderson admitted his difficulty with neoliberalism and with Baudrillard (whom he found was the major influence on Jameson’s take on the novelty of postmodernism) in the phrase: “This is a thinker whose temper, for better or worse, is incapable of assent to any notion with collective acceptance” (Anderson 1998: 52).4
Baudrillard’s Approach
Yet there is at the base of Baudrillard’s analysis an ironic reading of Karl Marx. It is made clear at the beginning of The Transparency of Evil: Marx was right on capitalism for the most part, but he did not grasp some important things. Capitalism was the only mode of production that has ever existed—an exception. The bourgeoisie was the only “class” that has existed—an exception. Instead of the proletariat overthrowing capitalism (it was trapped in its struggle for identity by capital), it fell to the bourgeoisie to negate itself in the process of putting an end to capitalism. What occurs with neoliberalism amounts to a “non-transcendent” revolution, but it has come into existence as an identity (and its important “thought collective” brought into view) (Peck 2010; Mirowski 2013).
To take a step back: Baudrillard, in The Mirror of Production ([1973] 1975), wrote a sharp critique of Julia Kristeva’s attempt to show that Marx had a conception of dépense (nonproductive, nonutilitarian expenditure) that could be used to develop a critique of Marxism from within Marxism (such critiques were inspired by Louis Althusser’s notion of theoretical involution—taking the advanced portion of doctrine to radicalize it). He claimed, nonetheless, that it was possible to turn some theorists against themselves in order to make them effective: Mauss against Mauss, Freud against Freud, Saussure against Saussure. But was this possible with Marx, since there was no apparent resource within Marxism radical enough to work with? It was, Baudrillard suggested, necessary to step out of Marxism, into the theory of symbolic exchange and sacrificial economy, to find such a resource. Yet indeed Baudrillard also found a resource within Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy, and he plays “with Marx, and against him” ([1973] 1975: 119), and his text still situates itself (as does his other three previous books) within an analysis of the capitalist system (147). Baudrillard retains Marxist theory as a theory that identifies three stages of value: a first stage, “when only the superfluous, the excess of production over consumption was exchanged”; a second stage, when “all products, all industrial existence, had passed into commerce”; and then, finally, a third stage, “when the very things which till then had been communicated, but never exchanged; given but never sold; acquired but never exchanged; acquired but never bought—virtue, love, conviction, knowledge, conscience, etc.—when everything, in short, passed into commerce. It is a time of general corruption, of universal venality” (Marx 1963: 34). This logic is extended by Baudrillard to the emergence of “the virtual international autonomy of finance capital, in the uncontrollable play of floating capital” ([1973] 1975: 129fn), and we might suggest here that Baudrillard theorizes not modes of production (there was only one) but modes of exchange and circulation: the year 1929 saw a crisis, “an inability to circulate production”; the year 1968 saw a symbolic crisis, “an inability to circulate the spoken word” (146); and the year 2008 saw a crisis, an inability to circulate debt.5
For Baudrillard, the formation of capitalism was a vast machine embedded in a unique cultural frame: “Capital, in fact, was never linked by a contract to the society that it dominates. It is a sorcery of social relations, it is a challenge to society, and it must be responded to as such” (1994b: 15). The rationalization of the frame (Baudrillard follows Max Weber’s well-known analysis) lays the basis for ideas of labor, use value, need, production, price and exchange value, commodity and capital markets. What marks the originality of his theoretical contribution is the thesis that, first, consumer capitalism, while still determined by a “mode of production” begins to reverse many of the fundamental alignments of the system, passing from limited production to one of unlimited reproduction: work does not precede production; reproduction creates work. Second, consumption becomes a specific kind of labor, and comes, in the end, to prevail over production. Third, social integration is facilitated by regimes of consumption realized in a new way—by personalization, or the creation of individualism as a cellular regime (Baudrillard [1970] 1998: 85), and this is a new obligation, not a form of liberalization within the system (93)—a “new serfdom” (98). One of the essential features of this new formation is the homogenization of previously distinct elements—goods, products, services, relations, and differences all become consumable items (89). Income differences actually decline very dramatically, yet differentiation continues along other dimensions (54, 57): “Instead of equalizing opportunities and reducing social competition (economic and social competition), the consumption process makes competition more violent and more acute in all its forms. Only in the consumer age are we at last in a society of generalized, totalitarian competition, which operates at all levels” (182; emphasis added). This is the structural law of value in operation and, in a specific sense, is the mode that already anticipates the abstract objective of ideological neoliberalism, the extension of competition beyond the market. There is however another crucial turning point, and the dominance of the figuration of consumer society outlined by Baudrillard in the late 1960s comes to an end by the early 1980s: “Consumer society still had the discrete charm of alienation … the new society promises to function in another way, glacial and non-spectacular. Operationality replaces utility, contact, ramification, promiscuity of information replaces the glamour (prestige) of transcendence” (1985a: 144–45; my translation). The regime of consumption had, by the mid-1980s, changed into one characterized by virulent liberalization, and “this revolution in things which lies no longer in their dialectical transcendence (Aufhebung) but rather in their potentialization (Steigerung) in their elevation to the second power, to the nth power—in that ascension to extremes related to the absence of rules for the game” (Baudrillard 1990a: 34). Neoliberal society does not arise out of the ashes of consumer society; it emerges with its sudden implosion.6
The Advent of Neoliberalism
The society and culture that opened up with Reagan and Thatcher was immediately identified as something new—and was, for a while, called “postmodern” (Crook, Pakulski, and Waters 1992). Indeed, many read Baudrillard as initially promoting the changes, as a “high priest of postmodernism,” until he explicitly took his distance from it (while our economy is “unreal and speculative, lacking even the notion of production, profit and progress, [it] is no longer modern but post-modern”; its culture is purely a form of recycling of “liberated” elements subject to an immense process of revision and cleaning up) (1994a: 36). That term has passed out of fashion (Ventura 2012: 6), and “neo-liberalization” has taken its place. Postmodernism is now regarded as a cultural configuration that flourished with the first effervescent period of deregulation: the (mirage of the) shrinking state, the reduction in taxation, deregulation of finance and markets, attack on the welfare state and Keynesian postwar institutional set-up, the emergence of new inequalities and globalization. This could be seen as a shift within capitalism, where production has been recentered in China and the dominance of finance capital has displaced that of industrial capital. Baudrillard’s analysis is remarkable in that he consistently resisted this option and took another: this new stage is no longer capitalist. In a sense, therefore, it is quite possible to argue that, in a Baudrillardian perspective, this is the decisive break, a break into a quite new culture, one in which for the first time (catastrophic) games of vertigo, or ilinx (from Caillois’s theory of games and play), predominate.7
The Elements of the New Society
In his analysis of consumer society, Baudrillard argued that poverty was a mythical object reproduced in different conjunctures by the system itself, but now something new is identified. A “fourth world” appears as a dumping ground for the excommunicated: “The have-nots will be condemned to oblivion, to abandonment, to disappearance pure and simple. This is the logic of must exit. Poor people must exit. The ultimatum issued in the name of wealth and efficiency wipes them off the map. And rightly so, since they show such bad taste as to deviate from the general consensus” (Baudrillard 1988: 111). There is now also a remarkable reversal of the beneficiaries of “socialism,” for they do not disappear but change form—from the poor to the rich (Baudrillard 1998: 55). At the same time, there is a displacement of the site of alienation: if alienation is no longer a class phenomenon, it reappears with the introjection of entrepreneurialism into the individual. With neoliberalism, the “individual is not an individual at all…. His only aim is the technical appropriation of the self. He is a convert to the sacrificial religion of performance, efficiency, stress and time-pressure—a much fiercer liturgy than that of production—total mortification and unremitting sacrifice to the divinities of data, total exploitation of oneself by oneself, the ultimate in alienation.” This is, he notes, “the greatest irreligious conversion in history … [which] merely conceals the fundamental integrism of this consensual society” (1994a: 106). This triumph of neoliberalism creates the hubris of the total elimination of evil, but evil stubbornly refuses to disappear: “It shows through [transparaît] in all things when they lose their image, their mirror, their reflection, their shadow, when they no longer offer any substance, distance or resistance, when they become both immanent and elusive from an excess of fluidity and luminosity” (40).
The End of Capitalism
How to think this complexity? And the specifically Baudrillardian paradox: How is it that all the institutions of advanced capitalism are in place, yet this is no longer a capitalist society? One way of thinking about this is to return to his discussion of explosion and implosion in the context of the classical bourgeois-democratic polity. In fact, Baudrillard notes two contradictory tendencies with respect to ecology: “Even as a strategy for the proper use of the world, as an ideal interaction of the world, is being employed, there is a simultaneous proliferation of enterprises of destruction, a total unleashing of the performance principle. And the very same forces often contribute to both trends” (1993c: 104). Neoliberalism around 1980 released the controls over explosive tendencies that were already in train. Neoliberal theory is one thing; neoliberalization is quite another—the latter plays with the former, for “the true motor is the abjection of free enterprise [la circulation libre]. Asocial and wild even today, refractory to any coherent social project” (1990a: 74; translation modified). One should note that Baudrillard sometimes appears to adopt a rather conservative functionalism in arguing that crises protect the system, rather as Émile Durkheim argued that crime is functional for a moral system. Yet this apparent functionalism is ironic, since though, in a sense, we are protected from the worst excesses the system can produce, it is not the social system that is protected in the last analysis, but “the energy of that virtual catastrophe which is the motor of all our processes, whether economic, or political, artistic or historical” (Baudrillard 1993c: 69).
Baudrillard’s theory is, like Marx’s, one that concerns the leading edge of system change. In other words, industrial capitalism and monopoly capitalism still exist. Thus the problem of reading Baudrillard is to square the enigma of how postcapitalism is the key to understanding the continuing existence of its conventional and traditional forms, which he has carefully bracketed off (Baudrillard’s own épochè). Reconstituting the theory as a whole leads to considerable complexity: the bourgeois-democratic state—with its political party system, its legal and criminal justice system, its banks, its industries and service sectors, its civil society, its domestic culture, its educational institutions, its sport culture, its various spheres (aesthetic, erotic, religious, public opinion, and journalism, etc.)—still exists as the institutional framework-habitus of contemporary Western societies (just as it is possible to talk of the entertainment-industrial-military complex). The neoliberal logic takes it through three phases: liberty, security, and terror (Baudrillard 1990a: 37). Baudrillard’s approach to the analysis of these formations is that the official frame is always doubled by a second one, more or less corrupted and contemptuous of it (the black market of goods and ideas [2001: 103–8]). The theorizing is rigorous: the world has become schizoid (Baudrillard 1990a: 109). Thus the essential question becomes: “Surely this acceleration, this excentric motion, must have an end, must imply a destiny for the human species, a different symbolic relationship with the world that is much more complex and ambiguous than a relationship of balance and interaction?” (Baudrillard 1993c: 104).
This complex doubled formation as a single unity, split off from the virtual order that orbits around it, is penetrated to its core institutions by the new logics of fourth-order fractal culture. Everything is altered by the fact that there are new rules to the game—or, paradoxically, by the fact that “there are no rules” becomes the rule. In the “the fractal (or viral or radiant) stage of value, there is no point of reference at all, and value radiates in all directions, occupying all interstices, with reference to anything whatever, by virtue of pure continguity … there is no longer any equivalence either natural or general” (Baudrillard 1993c: 5). The comfortable chair has been removed. In effect, the institutions that are thus modified by transpolitization, and thus become inertial, still continue; in fact, they function, like the Cold War, even more effectively. The struggles between the official and black market elements still continue, but in a new context, a new milieu, that is established through the threat of dissolution of spheres by transpolitization and implosion. There emerges a strange new decline in political power just as information levels explode (Baudrillard [1995] 2002: 82). Now this is not determined by money and finance capital directly (the reductive alternative of a general venality) but by the epidemic of value (no longer value in the old capitalist sense, based on some secure foundation and reality) that is by what Baudrillard calls “impossible exchange” across the remaining institutions and life-spheres. Money—and its operator, the living coin—follows this, and is no longer the old (Weberian) puritanical capital: now it is gambling, speculating, betting, playing the casino with a new logic, one that is now vertiginous, in games of ilinx. Casino gambling, as he pointed out in his discussion of seduction, is not undertaken to win—the ideology of neoliberal theory and the rational calculation of risk; it is undertaken to dissolve the rationality of calculation, to abolish chance, “to explore its secret connections and concatenations” (Baudrillard 2001: 87). Philip Mirowski writes: “Neoliberals … insist upon the thoroughgoing ignorance of everyone in the face of the all-knowing market … for them, accepting risk is not the fine balancing of probabilities … rather it is wanton ecstasy: the utter subjection of the self to the market” (2013: 119). Financial speculation takes the game beyond capitalism as a rational systematic and continuous mode of production, paradoxically realized as a one-dimensional neoliberal utopia, into “groundless hysteria and unscrupulous vitality” (Baudrillard 1990b: 38).
The Analysis of Neoliberalism
Money takes a central position in the analysis: it began to change from a medium of exchange to a site of pure circulation (Baudrillard [1976] 1993: 20–23). When Keynesians began managing consumption, “we enter a phase where neither production nor consumption retains any proper determinations nor respective ends” (21) and money is freed from controls on its reproduction (22)—and, as this develops, “we enter a cool era when the medium becomes the message…. Once a certain phase of disconnection has been reached, money is no longer a medium or a means to circulate commodities, it is circulation itself” (23).8 Indeed, it is clear, he says, that at first national economies can resist international speculative capital, but “it is the latter that is leading the way”—the “purest expression of the system” (23). It is interesting that Marshall McLuhan’s chapter on money in Understanding Media (1964) mentions John Maynard Keynes and the move away from the gold standard, and Baudrillard suggests that it is possible to go beyond this to what can be called, metaphorically, the loss of a gold standard of values and, subsequently, the loss of all gold standards of value reference. This withdrawal signals the end, for the individual subject, of a security within a stable conscience, a framework with solid foundations and clear rules. Baudrillard, in the 1970s, perceptively caught this change in the nature of capital, which was symbolized by the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and indeed the alteration of the character of banking. This is a change that initiates the dissolution of bourgeois Promethean capitalism as a mode of production. In terms conceived by Marx—and also, indeed, by Weber, who nevertheless remained within rational productivism—it would be a displacement of dominance from production to reproduction determined now by finance capital. In Baudrillardian theory, however, this “determination” brings a mutation into indetermination and radical uncertainty far beyond anything imagined by Marxists like Rudolf Hilferding and the Austro-Marxists who charted the rise of finance capital within the system and its linkage with imperialism.
The neoliberal system as a whole is divided, with the speculative financial order taking off into orbit, leaving the remainder in a disenchanted integral reality. It is important that these two orders never meet or come into contact. If they do, catastrophe and collapse ensue. Baudrillard was a theorist who anticipated and expected the financial collapse but not the renewed catastrophic contact between the virtual and the real economies ([1988] 2002). He did not live to see the collapse of 2007–8, but his writings from 2004 reveal important shifts in his preparation for another book (see Lotringer 2010). But it is cultural transpolitical forms that came to fascinate Baudrillard, such as the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor of California:
Behind this farce is a far-reaching political strategy, though certainly not a deliberate one (that would presuppose too high a level of intelligence) … America … is taking its revenge, in its own way, for the symbolic contempt in which it is held. In this way it demonstrates its imaginary power; for even more than in finance or weaponry, no other country can rival America in this headlong dash into political farce, in this nihilistic enterprise of the liquidation of values and all-out simulation, and it will remain ahead in this particular game for many years to come: in this extreme—empirical and technical—form of mockery and profanation of values, this radical obscenity and total impiety on the part of what is, otherwise, a “religious” people. This is the secret of its global hegemony. (2010a: 19)
The Road to the New Serfdom
The neoliberal individual is, of course, “free” to enter the market as a competitor, as an entrepreneur, and to play the role of consumer. But this is not the epoch of classical liberalism, of Liberty. It is not even that of liberal democracy, or social-democracy in a welfare state of the Keynesian regulated markets. The ideal individual of the neoliberal period is not the citizen but a rational actor now responsible for his or her destiny. It is a revised version of homo economicus, identified in the famous lectures of 1978–79 by Foucault ([2004] 2010). The neoliberal doctrine has its roots in a particular version of Adam Smith’s thesis that, in following one’s own egoistic interest in the market, the resulting natural harmony benefits everyone; acting altruistically leads to poverty and totalitarian disaster. In the extreme version (Ayn Rand, Margaret Thatcher), only the individual exists and “society” is bad fiction. Not only must the individual be liberated from the social, the social must be reconfigured by making the market principle the basis of the whole social order. Evidently this goes a long way beyond Adam Smith’s own philosophy, through the mutation that is Herbert Spencer’s notion of natural selection of the fittest, to Hayek’s idea of inserting competitive selection in every sphere of the society of individuals (Mirowski 2013: 58).
How does Baudrillard theorize this? He does not work through a genealogy of ideas, but certainly opts for an extreme version of Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept—the modern liberated man is emancipated as slave or serf (not, as the Austro-Marxists argued, proletarian become citizen). The new serfdom follows the logic of enslavement—to the seduction of information networks and to the demands of the new organization of one’s own personal identity. Whereas previously the individual knew where and what he was in relation to an employer, master, or lord, now, as a consumer establishes a personality in “living up” to models (Baudrillard [1970] 1998: 96), the individual, having become someone, must live up to an ever-changing identity. What is interesting is that, for Baudrillard, this is a new locus of the symbolic processes, and the relation to one’s identity is a new formation of obligation, and a fatal strategy—but, he adds, a derisory one. In this sense, and against the trend, Baudrillard warns against an easy and uncritical use of the ideas of a personal cultural capital that has become the jargon of neoliberal discourse: “What is a slave without a master? A person who has devoured his master and internalized him, to the point of becoming his own master” (2001: 55). Thus Baudrillard points to a problem of a more profound liberty: “It is always better to depend on something that does not depend on us. In this way I can avoid any kind of servitude” (1993c: 168).
Baudrillard against Baudrillard
Jacques Donzelot was a colleague of Baudrillard’s at Nanterre and taught a course jointly with him. His recollections subsume Baudrillard’s contributions to a kind of “patasociology,” an extreme analysis. In fact, “no one is more radical and all other radicalisms seem ridiculous as a result.” But there is a downside: “The patasociologist … denies sociological truth and indeed truth itself; denies good in the name of evil and reality in the name of the simulacrum…. Does he have a system of thought? Yes, if you want to put it that way. But, as with Nietzsche, it is a system-dismantling system” (Donzelot 2011: 368). This judgment is one-sided, since Baudrillard did produce a system that is open to correction; in other words, it was certainly not in denial of truth and, in some respects, was simply not radical enough to deal with the ruthless radicalism of neoliberalization and neoliberal doctrine and practice (see Klein 2007; Peck 2010) or the wider effects, such as the emergence of the “seventh” continent—the circulating mass of plastic in the oceans. The strange resort to pataphysics to evoke the neoliberal world seems to be an ornament and not vital or indeed radical at all, as Donzelot claims. Baudrillard bizarrely absolves pataphysics from his semioclasm. In the logic of neoliberal games, the subject-object polarities are reversed: the world thinks us. In terms of pataphysics, it is essential to play Baudrillard against Baudrillard, for if, as he says, the world itself has become pataphysical, it satirizes us, mocks us, ridicules us, toys with us. He once asked of the tactic used by Exxon: “The American government asks the multinational for a general report on all its activities throughout the world. The result is twelve volumes of a thousand pages each … where is the information?” (1990a: 13). But where is his analysis of the dissimulation of the manufacture of uncertainty developed? (see Oreskes and Conway 2010). Yet his famous injunction that “the task of thought is to make the world, if possible, even more enigmatic and unintelligible” (2001: 151) is the perfect formula of the neoliberal world’s efforts at such agnatology; this has been defined by Mirowski as “the manufacture of doubt and uncertainty” and, as such, goes far beyond propaganda, since “its hallmark techniques thrive off a hermeneutics of suspicion, with the result that the populace can maintain the comfortable fiction that it is not being manipulated by the obscure interests funding the initiatives” (Mirowski 2013: 226–27). These moves within contemporary neo-liberalism complicate considerably the classical conception of market knowledge as truth by Hayek, or veridiction by Foucault ([2004] 2010: 34). With the switch of polarities has come, especially after the revelatory events of 2008, a situation in which the banks and the corporations become “too big to fail.” Baudrillard remarks in an interview with François L’Yvonnet that he was again thinking of the importance of pataphysics because: “Once achieved, this integral reality is the Ubuesque accomplishment par excellence! Pataphysics might be said to be the only response to this phenomenon, both in its total confusion—it’s neither critical nor transcendent, it’s the perfect tautology of this integral reality, it’s the science of sciences—and at the same time it’s the monstrousness of it too” (2004: 5). Baudrillard was, in this crucial instance, reluctant in the end to let go of his pataphysical project and to follow its flourishing in the object; he did not say: Ubu thinks us. But something in the gaze from the Other had certainly changed (L’Yvonnet’s own discussion of Baudrillard’s pataphysics [2013: 49–58] does not register this change).
If we follow this back to the turning point in the mid-1970s of the BNP advertisement, Baudrillard refers to this once more in The Transparency of Evil, noting: “[The] banker got up like a vampire, saying, ‘I am after you for your money.’ A decade has already gone by since this kind of obscenity was introduced, with the government’s blessing, into our social mores. At the time we thought the ad feeble because of its aggressive vulgarity. In point of fact it was a prophetic commercial, full of intimations of the future shape of social relationships, because it operated, precisely, in terms of disgust, avidity and rape” (1993c: 73). And in one of his last texts, Baudrillard again refers to the BNP campaign, this time linked to the theme of evil: “What was new and scandalous was having these words come direct from the bankers themselves, the truth coming straight from the mouth of Evil … of the dominant power itself, and that power, secure in the knowledge of its total immunity” (2010b: 57).
We can now turn back to his initial analysis. It was first published in 1974 in Utopie (Baudrillard [1974] 2006, which reproduces the images from the bank’s campaign) and included in 1976 in L’Echange Symbolique et la Mort as a long footnote about the advertisement: “Votre argent m’interésse—donnant donnant—vous me prêtez votre argent, je vous fais profiter de ma banque” (1976: 53). He makes four points. First, this statement about value is usually hidden: “Candour is a second-degree mask” of exploitation. Second, there is a “macho complicity where men share the obscene truth of capital. Hence the smell of lechery … of the eyes glued to your money as if it were your genitals … a perverse provocation which is much more subtle than the simplistic seduction of the smile … the slogan quite simply signifies: ‘I am interested in your arse—fair’s fair—lend me your buttocks and I’ll bugger you.’” Third, there is the crucial switch behind this new obscenity: the law of equivalence of value (a = a; a = a + a′) is no longer dominant, thus this apparent restatement of it is a supplementary mystification. In so many words: “Capital no longer thrives on the rule of any economic law, which is why the law can be made into an advertising slogan, falling into the sphere of the sign and its manipulation.” Fourth, it might be thought this advertisement simply reveals the desire for open extraction of profit, but in fact, there is a new tautology here. A bank is a bank, not a = a + a′ but A is A: “that is to say a bank is a bank, a banker is a banker, money is money, and you can do nothing about it.”9
Perhaps this is Ubu reborn as banker, or en route to become the new cynically aggressive Ubu—Ubu as vampire? It is certainly clear that this is not the maternal mode of participative repression Baudrillard described in consumerism ([1969] 2001). There is something curiously static and nostalgic in Baudrillard’s relation to pataphysics (1976); he said the only strategy against the hyperrealist system is some form of pataphysics. And thirty years later, in The Intelligence of Evil (2005): “Integral Reality corresponds to the pataphysical sphere…. Ubu is the very symbol of this plethoric reality and, at the same time, the only response to the Integral Reality, the only solution that is truly imaginary in its fierce irony, its grotesque fullness. The great spiral belly of Pa Ubu is the profile of our world and its umbilical entombment” (2005: 45). There is a kind of nostalgia for the pataphysics that he adopted in his youth (and that, as he admitted, played havoc with his early career [2004: 4–5]). And if we turn to his early piece on pataphysics, we can see that his relationship to it was far from being unambiguous—he rejected it in favor of Artaud’s theater of cruelty, for “pataphysics is impossible” ([1948] 2005: 215). It was both a basis of ironic critique that he wanted and one that he had already rejected—one that he never worked through, developed, and assessed. It remained as it always was, a precocious but childish unchanging resource that he had disavowed: “pataphysics was a kind of esoteric parenthesis” and “pataphysics isn’t a reference for me … things have to be lost”—they disappear, disperse like anagrams in what follows (2004: 6). Baudrillard could not let go of a pataphysics, and it remained an obscure object. No one has yet studied the way in which it functions in his writings (though see Genosko 1994; Teh 2006). It is linked to a concept of freedom that is quite different from that of the neoliberals. For neoliberals, one must accept the responsibility “as a subject, for the objective conditions of one’s own life.” But, Baudrillard argues: “As long as I am subject to objective conditions, I am still an object, I am not wholly free—I have to be freed from that freedom itself. And this is possible only in play, in that more subtle freedom of play, the arbitrary rules of which paradoxically free me, whereas in reality I am kept in chains by my own will” (2001: 56–57). But pataphysics remained a favorite toy, not anagrammatic; it is the image of the world (in its absurdity), and it is the “only response” to the world (by treating it as a method of finding imaginary solutions to problems that do not exist). Thus if there is an occlusion of the ways in which the world is reconstructed in alignment with liberalization, it nevertheless shows through, and Ubu is a medium of ventriloquous evil (2010b: 61). For example, Baudrillard could write acutely on the burning of cars in the banlieues in France in “The Pyres of Autumn” (2006), for as he said, notoriously, “even signs must burn” ([1972] 1981: 163), but the initiation ritual of the student Bullingdon Club at Oxford University—the club of which both Cameron and Osborne were previously members—which involved burning a £50 note in front of a tramp, and which came to light in the British press in February 2013, is a newly invented neoliberal ritual that Baudrillard did not foresee.10
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Richard G. Smith and Andrew Wernick for comments on an early version of this article.
“Once, out of some obscure need to classify, I proposed a tripartite account of value…. Let me introduce a new particle into the microphysics of simulacra. For after the natural, commodity and structural stages of value comes the fractal stage” (Baudrillard 1993c: 5). Two readings of this are possible: one, that it is pure pataphysics and that it gives Baudrillard license to ridicule the system with which he has almost completely lost critical contact (Genosko 1994: 54); or, two, that it is a tactical theoretical move to grasp new departures of the system (Pawlett 2007: 107–32). Some commentators have followed the first option; here, I examine the second. Baudrillard realized, though not out of familiarity with its doctrine, that with neoliberalism there is a profound paradox—as against classical “liberalism”—since “excessive control” and “deregulation” accompany each other (2010a: 101). I suggest although Baudrillard rarely referred to “neoliberalism” as such (and most of the leading figures and theorists of what is now called neoliberalism did not call it that either; see Steger and Roy 2010: x), it is nonetheless possible to see that, along with Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu (see Audier 2012b; Dardot and Laval 2013), he provided one of its most important and remarkable theoretical assessments. Baudrillard tracked the logics of neoliberal culture, employing at certain precise points, in an analytical frame reconstructed from Karl Marx, Marshall McLuhan, and Friedrich Nietzsche, a Jarryesque ethnography: “The opposite of the enthnological enterprise … not of reducing exoticism but inventing it…. This endeavour is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the social sciences” (Baudrillard 2005: 89). So with neoliberalism, a turning point can be identified. Yet the emergence of “postmodern” culture in the 1980s surprised Baudrillard. “One might have expected the orgy of the sixties and seventies to throw up a mobile, disenchanted elite, but that has not been the case: the members of this elite, at least in their own publicity, see themselves as mobile and enchanted. Their enchantment takes mild forms: they are motivated, but not impassioned, they present themselves as cosily effective” (1988: 108). The European yuppies of the 1980s, Baudrillard notes, are a
new generation, that of the spoilt children of the crisis, whereas the preceding one was that of the accursed children of history. These romantic, worldly young people, imperious and sentimental, are refinding the poetic prose of the heart and, at the same time, the path of business. For they are the contemporaries of the new entrepreneurs and they are themselves wonderful media animals. Transcendental, P.R. idealism. With an eye for money, changing fashions, high-powered careers—all things scorned by the hard generations. A soft ambition too: that of a generation which has already been successful in everything, which has everything going for it, which practises solidarity with ease, which no longer bears the stigmata of the curse of class. (1990b: 225)
The new situation, Baudrillard noted, was one in which “something escapes us, and we are escaping from ourselves, or losing ourselves, as part of an irreversible process; we have now passed some point of no return, the point where the contradictoriness of things ended, and we find ourselves, still alive, in a universe of non-contradiction, of enthusiasm, of ecstasy—of stupor in the face of a process which, for all its irreversibility, is bereft of meaning” (1993c: 33). It is perhaps no accident that this passage from The Transparency of Evil is followed immediately by a paragraph taken from Cool Memories (entry dated 1980; see 1990b: 15) a decade earlier: “Money is now the only genuine artificial satellite. A pure artefact, it enjoys truly astral mobility; and it is instantaneously convertible. Money has now found its proper place, a place far more wondrous than the stock exchange: the orbit in which it rises and sets like some artificial sun” (Baudrillard 1993c: 33). From a scene of crisis to one of catastrophe: to what has been called in another, but perhaps now visible as an older, Marxian discourse “disaster capitalism” (Klein 2007).
It is important to remember Baudrillard’s mode of theorizing does not aim to provide an account of the dominant reality of a social order. It is very specifically and explicitly based on exaggeration, generalization, and a writing that is divided between semiotic and symbolic polarities. And, at one point, he does claim that his way of theorizing is Marxist: “The objection that our society is still largely dominated by the logic of commodities is irrelevant. When Marx set out to analyze capital, capitalist production was still largely a minority phenomenon. When he designated political economy as the determining sphere, religion was still largely dominant. The theoretical decision is never made at the quantitative level, but at the level of a structural critique” (1975: 121). This means, as has often been noted, that Baudrillard can move between two quite distinct and opposed hypotheses as different orders of simulacra emerge at the same time. It also opens up this mode of theorizing to the charge that it can be focused on a cultural logic that, though at the edge of things, is not at the heart of them. This charge can also be leveled at McLuhan, whose ideas are also extended in a new reading and who, of course, famously did not want to “explain” but “explore.”
I had the opportunity to discuss these theories with Jean Baudrillard, particularly in relation to the theses of Perry Anderson, during his visit to the United Kingdom in November 1992. Also notable was his interest in the precise mechanisms of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and the speculation (George Soros famously laid a bet of $10 billion) on Britain’s exit from it on September 16, 1992. The deeper difficulty of confronting the novelties of neoliberalism crop up in other ways. For instance, the virulent attack on the French “impostors” by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont (1998) was, as many reviews pointed out at the time, really a political defense of the old Left and its struggle to maintain a focus on the reality of the social. Quoting at length, especially passages dealing with the emergence of neoliberalism, they conclude Baudrillard uses a “pseudo-scientific terminology—inserted in sentences that are, as far as we can make out, devoid of meaning” (1998: 142). The terminology they object to is that of the fractal and the idea of the cultural space of neoliberalism as a hyperspace in which there are strange attractors. Their commentary avoids political or cultural theory and suggests Baudrillard has not understood the science of two different types of attractors and uses this terminology to add profundity to “trite observations about sociology” (1998: 141–43). Here I argue that the terminology is used to avoid trite observations, and one would be hard pressed to find any observations about sociology at all in Baudrillard’s work.
Thus the question arises: How did the bourgeoisie put an end to the capitalist mode of production and effect its own disappearance? The question that is posed in America (1988) is all the more remarkable since Reagan and Thatcher aimed to save capitalism from incipient socialism and to put an end to the dangers of socialism and communism. But Baudrillard had already argued that, with the emergence of consumer society, the fate of radical politics was sealed. The system could absorb it; indeed, radical opposition might even strengthen the system as a form of inoculation. The internal process of dialectical transcendence seemed no longer possible; opposition to the system could come only from a logic that was outside: the symbolic order, or symbolic cultures of the third world (the “mirror peoples”). From the 1980s onward, it is the symbolic figure of evil that plays this role and that provides Baudrillard with “intelligence.” Two fatal strategies were identified: a catastrophic collapse from within the system (though some catastrophes come to the aid of the system) or a strategy that pushes the system to even greater extremes and to collapse. New social movements were identified and supported in the 1970s ([1973] 1975) but later abandoned (2010b), as forces that could transcend the system. In his last book, The Intelligence of Evil (2005), he did refer to them again, briefly and ambiguously, as a last refuge: “It may even be that the only refuge from the global, from a total exposure to the laws of the market, will once again be the condition of wage-earner, the ‘social’ with its institutional protection” (53). However, the system itself had already mutated through an internal immanent transformation. His last texts are characterized by the ambivalence of a pessimistic lucidity (see Featherstone 2011).
Implosion is discussed in relation to how primitive cultures control their implosive cultures, and how, if these controls this fail, the culture explodes; advanced cultures are controlled explosive cultures, but if their controls fail, the culture implodes ([1978] 2007: 73–75). In Baudrillard’s analysis, then, there are indications of implosion in the culture picked up from about 1977–78 onward (the idea is to be found in Simulacra and Simulation, in a crucial passage on the end of the panopticon—“there is no longer a medium in the literal sense: it is now intangible, diffused, and diffracted in the real” [1994b: 30]). In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities ([1978] 2007) introduces the idea of the implosion of the social into the mass. And Baudrillard also wrote of “implosion of the social into the media” (1985b, [1978] 2007). This period changes things from crisis to catastrophe and, against Umberto Eco then, there can be no “good use” of the media; there is only “a logical exacerbation, and a catastrophic resolution” (1994b: 84). Again it has to be emphasized that Baudrillard has focused on the extreme neoliberal logic of the process here, bracketing off other simulacral orders, his own épochè, while others, like Eco, confront the many diverse ways in which the media are dealt with by different strata of consumers. Without acknowledgment to McLuhan or Baudrillard, Donna Haraway suggests, from another perspective, that the “implosion of dimensions implies loss of clear and distinct identities, but not loss of mass or energy. Maybe to describe what gets sucked into the gravity well of a massive unknown universe, we have to risk getting close enough to be permanently warped by the lines of force. Or maybe we already live inside” (1997: 69). There are some excellent discussions of McLuhan and Baudrillard on implosion, especially by Gary Genosko (1999) and in William Merrin’s very perceptive discussion of this concept in relation to the media (2005). My discussion in this article is to argue that the process of media implosion is an aspect of the wider logic of liberalization and transpolitization. Merrin (2005: 52–54) examines the ways in which Baudrillard’s analyses depart from those of McLuhan.
The encounter with the emergence of the neoliberal world would begin with the explosion of deregulation. It is not simply economic privatization and deregulation that has occurred: all the spheres are affected by this virulence. Beyond a certain point, the aim and purpose of institutions disappear into pure inertia, as simple accelerated impulsion is enough for them to function—for example, in the striking example of the continued US surveillance of European politicians. Then, as forces and energies are deregulated, the separate spheres of an articulated (bourgeois) society also lose their identity, and a process of transpolitization occurs: the appearance of the transaesthetic, transeconomic, transsexual formations, etc., of “transpolitical figures” of obesity, obscenity, terrorism (opening up the possibility of a terrorist transference of situation). The neoliberal objective is to ensure society engages a single principle, not master race, or proletarianization, but one linked to performance, in sport and in enterprise, and it is virtualization that paves the way for the extension of this function (Baudrillard 2005: 92–93). A key moment of neoliberalization, and a central idea in the works of F. A. Hayek, is the dissolution of the “social” at this juncture, which Baudrillard presents as the logic of the new system: “In the absence of an original political strategy (which is indeed perhaps no longer possible), and in view of the impossibility of a rational management of the social realm, the State becomes desocialized. It no longer works on the basis of intimidation, dissuasion, simulation, provocation or spectacular solicitation. It invents a politics of disaffection and indifference. This is the transpolitical reality behind all official policies: a cynical bias towards the elimination of the social” (1993c: 79).
This remarkable passage was picked up by Julian Pefanis (1991: 63) and discussed by Gary Genosko (1999: 88). Without drawing further conclusions, Genosko says “this disconnected kind of money has … the power to ‘rend and wrack’ any national economy…. Cool money relates only to itself, ‘pariticipates’ in its own inflationary spiral … and it surpasses in its abstractness and the speed at which it moves, hot hardware and even credit, with anarchic consequences.”
Perhaps Baudrillard had read Ayn Rand’s influential neoliberal novel Atlas Shrugged ([1957] 2007), part 3 of which is titled “A is A,” in which the hero remarks “all the pain you have endured came from your attempt to evade the fact that A is A” (Rand [1957] 2007: 1016). Capitalism freeing itself from labor is the theme of the book, picked up by Baudrillard, in his own way, as “It’s a monster which is standing liberation on its head. It’s capital now that’s liberating itself from the workers!” (1998: 56).
But he did suggest a “proposal for a new law: all the speculators whose ill-gotten gains exceed the earnings of an average worker over the course of his or her working life will be sentenced to death” (Baudrillard 2003: 42).
