Jean Baudrillard, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The question is really several questions at once, so let me trace the arc. The starting point is the world of objects and signs — the analysis of how consumer society operates not through need but through a code that organizes differences, a system where signs refer not to things but to other signs.1 From there the break becomes necessary: Marx's championing of use-value against exchange-value rests on the assumption that use-values serve human needs in some natural, transparent way, and that assumption is itself a myth — the naturalist alibi by which the production-paradigm disguises its own metaphysical character.2
The critique of capital conducted from the side of use-value never escapes capital's own logic; it operates on capital's terms. What the production-paradigm represses is what Mauss and Bataille name: the gift and counter-gift, expenditure without return, the symbolic dimension in which obligation is real and reversibility — la réversibilité — is the formal principle.3
This is not nostalgia for pre-capitalist societies. It is the diagnosis of what the West has constitutively excluded, and what it has excluded does not stay excluded. The historical itinerary of that exclusion runs through three orders of simulacra.4 The counterfeit belongs to the classical period after the Renaissance, when the feudal prohibition on signs collapsed and the emancipated sign began its career.5
Serial production belongs to the industrial era. Simulation — the third order — is the current code-governed phase, in which the model precedes the territory, modulation is more fundamental than serial reproducibility, and the structural law of value has displaced the market law.6 Every order subsumes the previous one: the counterfeit was captured by industrial reproduction, and the entire order of production is now toppling into operational simulation.7
What this produces, at the political level, is the dissolution of representation itself. Power has not simply weakened; the mechanical illusion of power still organizes the social order while behind it grows the absent, illegible terror of a definitive code.8 Attacking representation no longer has much meaning, because representation has turned in on itself, and the logical universe of the political has ceded its place to a transfinite universe of simulation in which no one is represented and no one represents anything.9
What remains is defiance rather than hope — a tactical universe of the simulacrum, fought from inside, without the consolation of an external critical standpoint.10 The late formulation names this condition integral reality: the joint assault by information and informatique on the symbolic order escalates until mere simulation — reality supplanted by its models — yields to hyperreality, where events are definitively deterred.11
The range of forms the symbolic once comprehended (challenge, seduction, play, sacrifice, counter-gift) finds its objective embodiment in what I came to call stratégies fatales, irreconciliation, objective irony — and finally, simply, evil, in the precise sense of the principle that the system of total production cannot absorb.12 That is the arc: from the sociology of the object to the critique of productivism, from symbolic exchange to the orders of simulacra, from simulation to integral reality.
Each stage does not extend the previous one — it exposes its limit and renders it obsolete, including positions I had previously held.
Baudrillard's first period as a social theorist began with an analysis of the world of everyday objects and, by extension, of advertising and the media.The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, pp. 7–8
Baudrillard mounts an 'anthropological' challenge to Marx's championing of use-value against exchange-value, a position based ultimately on the assumption that use-values merely subserve human needs aculturally and transparently.The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, pp. 7–8
Mauss's theory of gift-exchange and Bataille's 'general economy'... What is alien to it - and essential to the symbolic order - is la réversibilité (the reversibility/revertibility) of signs, particularly of life and death, proper to symbolic exchange.The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, pp. 7–8
There are three orders of simulacra, running parallel to the successive mutations of the law of value since the Renaissance.Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 71
The end of the obligatory sign is succeeded by the reign of the emancipated sign, in which any and every class will be able to participate.Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 71
Modulation is ultimately more fundamental than serial reproducibility, distinct oppositions more than quantitative equivalences, and the commutation of terms more than the law of equivalences; the structural, not the market, law of value.Symbolic Exchange and Death, pp. 77–78
Every order subsumes the previous order. Just as the order of the counterfeit was captured by the order of serial reproduction... so the entire order of production is in the process of toppling into operational simulation.Symbolic Exchange and Death, pp. 77–78
Power is being lost, power has been lost. All around us there are nothing but dummies of power, but the mechanical illusion of power still rules the social order, behind which grows the absent, illegible, terror of control, the terror of a definitive code.Simulacra and Simulation, pp. 159–160
representation itself has also turned in on itself, and the whole logical universe of the political is dissolved at the same time, ceding its place to a transfinite universe of simulation, where from the beginning no one is represented nor representative of anything any more.Simulacra and Simulation, pp. 159–160
it is in this tactical universe of the simulacrum that one will need to fight—without hope, hope is a weak value, but in defiance and fascination.Simulacra and Simulation, pp. 159–160
mere 'simulation' (the state in which reality is supplanted by its models) yields to hyper-reality or integral reality (where events are definitively 'deterred').The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, pp. 11–12
The range of forms comprehended in the 'symbolic' (challenge, seduction, play, sacrifice, counter-gift) finds objective embodiment in a cluster of processes variously described as stratégies fatales, irreconciliation, objective irony, and later non-unification, the principle of evil or simply evil.The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, pp. 11–12