SAARUTU · Socioanalysis and Alien Anthropology Research Unit at Theory Underground · Master Reference Document
This document gathers the SAARUTU briefs on Baudrillard into one reference and synthesizes them. It is built to stand on its own. A reader who has the briefs in hand will find here the comparative and contrastive work the briefs deliberately leave undone, the recurrence of a formulation across books set side by side, the points where a later work reworks or reverses an earlier one. A reader who has only this document should come away with usable command of the whole trajectory, able to draft an essay on any one of Baudrillard's concepts and find the receipts already gathered, in full, sorted, and cited.
The use it is built for is writing. The spine of the document is the concept lexicon below: each entry gathers every place Baudrillard states a concept, reworks it, qualifies it, or reverses it, each instance carried whole as a block quote with its page anchored, so the recurrence and the variation are both visible on the page. Connective sentences state only the move each passage makes and how the passages relate. They do not summarize in place of a quote. The closer the entry sits to a concept-organized arsenal of full passages, the shorter the distance from this document to a finished piece.
One editorial stance governs throughout. The job is to make present what the texts contain, in fidelity and detail. The document reconstructs Baudrillard's own concepts and corpus and nothing else. It imports no external standard against which the texts are found wanting and carries no application or relevance sections. Where two works pull against each other, or where Baudrillard's account of his own project diverges from what a text enacts, the difference is shown precisely, anchored in full quotes on each side, and the tension is held open rather than resolved.
Seven primary texts are synthesized here, in the editions and translations the briefs were built on, placed in order of original French publication:
The Consumer Society (La société de consommation, 1970), trans. Chris Turner; For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (Pour une critique de l'économie politique du signe, 1972), trans. Charles Levin; The Mirror of Production (Le miroir de la production, 1973), trans. Mark Poster; Symbolic Exchange and Death (L'échange symbolique et la mort, 1976), trans. Iain Hamilton Grant; In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (À l'ombre des majorités silencieuses, 1978), trans. Foss, Patton, and Johnston; Simulacra and Simulation (Simulacres et simulation, 1981), trans. Sheila Faria Glaser; and The Perfect Crime (Le crime parfait, 1995), trans. Chris Turner. Full bibliographic detail, including the specific reprints the page numbers track, is at the foot of the document.
The boundary is worth stating in the negative, since this is a living document that will grow. The System of Objects (1968) sits just before the earliest text gathered here and is referenced by it; Seduction (1979) and Fatal Strategies (1983) carry the turn toward the object and the reversal of the subject that the late metaphysics depends on; the very late work continues past The Perfect Crime. Those installments, and a reception layer gathering the interpreters where they do load-bearing work, are to be folded in as the briefs are written. Where a concept here clearly opens onto one of those uncovered texts, the entry says so rather than pretending the trajectory ends in 1995.
Baudrillard's chronology is load-bearing, because when he said a thing is part of what it means. The arc runs in four movements, and the joints between them are real, but the first joint is contested by the work itself and the document holds that open rather than smoothing it.
The early work extends the critique of political economy to the world of objects and then to the sign. Consumption is reconstructed not as the appropriation of things for use but as a logic of signs and differences, a code that classifies persons and integrates society. The decisive theoretical instrument, the four logics of value and the isolation of sign-value as the operative one, is built in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Charles Levin, who translated that book, places its eleven essays between The System of Objects and The Consumer Society on one side and The Mirror of Production on the other, and resists any clean break narrative, reading the volume as the point where Western Marxism turns on itself while still working through its problematics.
The Mirror of Production turns the critique against Marxism itself, arguing that historical materialism universalizes the categories of political economy, projects production and labor onto societies and onto a human nature that never knew them, and so functions as the mirror in which capital contemplates itself rather than as its outside. This is the hinge on which the positive counter-principle becomes necessary: if the critique of the economic cannot be conducted from inside the economic, it has to be conducted from somewhere the economic excludes.
Symbolic Exchange and Death names that somewhere. Symbolic exchange, the reversible, ambivalent circulation of the gift and the counter-gift that the law of value excludes, is set against the whole regime of equivalence, and death is read as the structural cut the system labors to defer. This book also works out, in its central section, the genealogy of the three orders of simulacra. That genealogy is the documented hinge into the next movement: Simulacra and Simulation footnotes its three-order scheme back to the essay "L'ordre des simulacres" here.
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