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<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'>So ‘Baudrillard's work was essentially a collection of bitter
lesser footnotes to Debord’?<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'>Yet more lunacy! It’s another one of those undergraduate claims
that’s widely accepted and seems to hold true … as long as you
don’t think too much about it …<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'>Luckily another commentator has already demonstrated the different
theoretical project Baudrillard developed and the path of his work as he moved
from a semiotic critique of consumerism to a reconsideration of the system of
value that underpins generalised political economy and its semiotic reality
principle … and that’s before we get to the rest of his work and
the different paths it takes and subjects it tackles … Clearly Baudrillard
was so much more than his apparent debt to Debord suggests. Even if you could
reduce Baudrillard to such a simplistic formulation it’s interesting to
see how with his later pessimistic comments on the integrated spectacle Debord in
‘Comments on the Society of the Spectacle’ becomes a poor shadow of
Baudrillard who does it all so much better…<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'>The claim also seems to suggest Debord was such an original thinker
when actually he was a wonderful plagiarist: the most interesting parts of his
work are those that rewrite (and often don’t even rewrite) Hegel, Marx
and Lukacs. More importantly we could question whether Baudrillard really was
so in thrall to Debord. Baudrillard’s first major discussion of media
simulation in ‘Mass Media Culture’ in ‘The Consumer
Society’ is explicitly based upon Boorstin’s ‘The Image’
and Debord isn’t even mentioned, so the importance of the concept of the
spectacle for Baudrillard could be questioned. Boorstin’s work was more
obviously influential upon his theory of simulation and Debord widely lifted
that too in ‘Society of the Spectacle’. However, whilst all Debord
does with Boorstin is directly employ him whilst critiquing him within his
Marxist perspective, Baudrillard takes Boorstin’s ideas on pseudo-events
and pseudo-reality as a starting point, combines them with McLuhan and Barthes
and historical debates on the simulacrum and radicalises them to develop an original
social and media theory.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'>We could also reconsider Baudrillard’s debt to and position
within the avant-garde. Instead of seeing him as coming out of Situationism you
could make a better case for the influence of Dadaism (Johannes Baader – ‘Superdada’
– wrote in 1920 that World War One didn’t exist and that it was ‘a
newspaper war’ …) although the strongest influence is undoubtedly
Alfred Jarry. Whilst Baudrillard took elements of Situationism (along with McLuhan,
Barthes, Marcuse etc.) for his <i><span style='font-style:italic'>description</span></i>
of the contemporary world, Jarry’s life, provocations, writings and
method all infused Baudrillard’s <i><span style='font-style:italic'>critical
position</span></i> and theoretical methodology so he is a far more influential
figure on Baudrillard than Debord. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'>But to finish with this argument once and for all we only have to look
at the radical Durkheim tradition, running through Mauss and Hubert, Durkheim,
Bataille, Caillois and the College of Sociology etc. Their ideas of the
festival, sacrifice, the gift etc. are explicitly reconceptualised by Baudrillard
under the rubric of ‘symbolic exchange’ as the basis for his entire
critical position. He also develops their critique of political economy (see Mauss’s
attack on ‘homo economicus’) and their historical critique of the
loss of this ‘sacred’ mode of relations and meaning, employing
Barthes, McLuhan, Debord, etc. to describe and lay out the contours of the contemporary
semiotic system that continues this historical destruction and indeed expands
it beyond anything Bataille or Caillois etc. ever conceived of. Interestingly
Lefebvre’s critique of everyday life takes up the idea of the ‘festival’;
Situationism came out of the Lettrist movement with their journal ‘potlatch’,
named after Mauss’s study of the gift; Debord writes in SoS about reversible
time (echoing Caillois’ ‘Man and the Sacred’ on the festival)
and Raoul Vaneigem writes in ‘the Revolution of Everyday Life’ about
sacrifice and gifts etc. It’s remarkable how much the ideas of radical
Durkheimianism infused Situationism and western marxism. But they took these
ideas only to deploy them as a tool in their Marxism – Vaneigem seeing the
gift etc. as a means of reconfiguring relations in a post-revolutionary world.
Thus all the radical and violent energy of these ideas was reduced by their incorporation
into Marxism, being made to work for the great revolutionary project. >From this
perspective we can see Baudrillard as the true heir of radical Durkheimianism,
extending and reviving it for the contemporary age and we can see Situationism
and Debord as reactionary plagiarists of another, earlier theory whose power
and force they didn’t understand …<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'>Debord? A footnote to Baudrillard.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'>William Merrin<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'>Dept of media and Communications<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><st1:PlaceType w:st="on"><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'>University</span></font></st1:PlaceType> of <st1:PlaceName
w:st="on">Wales</st1:PlaceName>, <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">Swansea</st1:City></st1:place><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
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