Passing Through Philosophical Spirals
Indisputably one of the most important French thinkers of the 20th century, Jean Baudrillard is
the radical theorist who has influentially argued through the years that simulations and simulacra
(representations of the real) have substituted and perverted reality, that Disneyland and the
United States are one and the same, and that the Gulf War never really occurred, that it was the
fabricated product of a hyperreal media spectacle.
As a pioneer of the field of postmodern theory, Baudrillard's complex theories of contemporary
society can be daunting material to readers unfamiliar with the socio-historical roots of Marxist
and post-Marxist thought, or those unfamiliar with Ivory Tower jargon. However,
Passwords is an accessible retrospective of Baudrillard's most important concepts,
developed over decades, that characterize and critique the social trends that catalyze the
machinery of production, consumption, and symbolism.
Passwords is also a reflexive and philosophical maze: It is structured around its very title,
offering meditational vignettes framed in one of sixteen key terms. These terms include object,
value, symbolic exchange, the virtual, chaos, destiny, and thought (among others). The book is
anything but a glossary; each concept consecutively builds into the next, subtly implying and
explicitly invoking the following and previous terms in a labyrinth of ideas that comprise a chain
of referents that, by the end of the book, refer us back to its very beginning. From the outset,
Baudrillard explains that the title means to reflect that words not only transmit ideas but that they
"themselves metaphorize and metabolize into one another by a kind of spiral evolution. It is in
this way that they are 'passers' or vehicles of ideas."
The chain of passwords begins with a basic component of Baudrillard's thought: the object. A
term he re-conceptualised in the context of Marxist thought during 1960s capitalism, Baudrillard
states that he has always been interested in the relationships established by objects --
commodities -- and the ways that they subvert the real world by privileging consumption and
profit above all else. Thus in the context of gross capitalism, these objects break away from the
traditional Marxist notion of use value and instead engage in a symbolic play with one another.
The object thus simultaneously designates the real world but also its absence.
Value, which follows object, builds on Baudrillard's project to re-think the object in relation to
Marx's dialectical notions of use value and exchange value. Anthropology serves as his main
inspiration to think beyond the use and exchange value dialectic: "Anthropology gives us access
to societies and cultures in which the notion of value as we understand it [in Western societies] is
virtually nonexistent, in which things are never exchanged directly for one another, but always
through the mediating agency of a transcendence, an abstraction."
Baudrillard's term "symbolic exchange," influenced by Marcel Mauss' anthropological work on
gift exchange, differs from exchange value as we are not solely dealing with the object's use,
price tag, or potential for exchange. Exchange occurs instead along lines of social status, and is
thus exchanged as sign. (We might think of it this way: two identical wool sweaters have the
same use value and ostensibly have the same exchange value until the label GAP is affixed to
one of them. We are now dealing with symbolic value and symbolic exchange as that label now
transforms the sweaters into objects of unequal value whose difference is social status.)
In this manner, each concept discursively builds into and upon the next. Built into the concepts
are descriptions of the very form of Passwords. For example, he writes that "We are
today in what I would call a 'Moebius-strip' system. If we were in a face-to-face, confrontational
system, strategies could be clear, based on a linearity of causes and effects. But we are in a
completely random universe in which causes and effects are piled one upon the other according
to this Moebius-strip model, and no one can know where the effects of the effects will end." Like
the Moebius-strip paradigm, the concepts at the heart of the book invoke, reflect, subvert, and
play with one another, sometimes compelling the careful reader to read the book backwards so
that she or he might then begin reading forwards again.
At times, his statements can be daunting, especially given the socio-political agency that
simulacra and hyperreal media have harnessed in the era of globalization. On the topic of the
virtual, Baudrillard writes, "The virtual now is what takes the place of the real; it is the final
solution of the real in so far as it both accomplishes the world in its definitive reality and makes
its dissolution. At this point, it is the virtual which thinks us: no need now for a subject of
thought, a subject of action; everything happens by technological mediation."
Towards the end of the book, he offers a final notion of exchange which he calls "impossible
exchange." This term conveys something that cannot be exchanged for anything else. Two
examples of the impossible exchange are destiny and the world since there is and can be no
equivalent of either. When readers reach "the last word," Baudrillard's final term, he resists the
very concept of a linear ending, favoring instead the geometrical figure of the spiral since "We
have not taken a single step closer to some possible end-goal. We have merely gone through a
number of paradigms that have no end other than in the moment of their metamorphosis."
We are thus taken back to the introductory metaphor of words as "passers" of ideas. The
impossible closure of "the end" of the book, which flings readers back to its beginning, allows
for that spiral of meanings to kick start itself again, and on the second and subsequent readings
readers presumably catalyze the eternal metamorphosis of the concepts within their own minds.
Readers hopefully realize here how influenced culture is by global capital, yet how empowering
the mirrored halls of Baudrillard's Passwords can be.
— 21 January 2004
