Consumption Markets & Culture

Submission Instructions

Baudrillard’s fatal present

 

Joel Hietanen, Centre for Consumer Society Research, University of Helsinki

Søren Askegaard, University of Southern Denmark

Onni Tulensalo, Aalto University School of Business

 

There was a time when postmodern thought rushed in to complicate the conventions of marketing and consumer research and to expediate their interpretative aspirations (Brown 2001; Shankar and Patterson 2001). The moment was marked by the jubilant promotion of a liberatory view of the consumer lifestyle (Firat and Venkatesh 1995) and an expansion of the field’s methodological toolkit (Brown 1993). While this optimism pluralised the academic discourse, its purported emancipatory logics soon took on a more sombre late capitalist tenor in the more critical corridors of the field (see Shankar, Whittaker and Fitchett 2006; also Ahlberg, Hietanen and Soila 2021). Today, not much is debated in postmodern terms, its conceptual poles of suspicious playfulness and ironic bricolage now fallen eerily silent. Did the idea of postmodernity retreat like any other faddish tide of a now neatly compartmentalised era? Or is it today only barely concealed beneath a more sinister air, where a pharmakon delivered so much that it effectively disappeared? Has what was once offered as productive enthusiasm graduated to the surface-level ahistoricity and spectacle of a culture in proliferate dissolution, as was indeed a part of the mood all along (see Jameson 1991; Lyotard 1984)? Are we there yet, there where Jean Baudrillard (1998) saw how the “subject of consumption is the order of signs” (p. 192, emphasis added)?

 

Baudrillard was often keen to write how we should forget those who could not live up to his radicality in social theory. In interpretive marketing and consumer research, it feels like his profound critique of consumer society was never really remembered for inclusion in the first place. Today, with relatively few references made to his work, it feels that a spectre of his absence looms over the field. To us this vacuity insists and asks: Why has Baudrillard’s social theory been so neglected despite him being one of the few contemporary philosophers who truly focused on consumption? This situation persists even though his work has been recognised as canonical in consumer research (Østergaard 2017) and despite calls to exhume him for understanding the contemporary atmosphere of consumer society today (Brown 2023).

 

To our knowledge, apart from several hasty placeholder references, Baudrillard’s challenge has been seriously considered in our field only in a vanishing number of texts. His work has been used to criticise the purported virtuosity of marketing (Cherrier and Murray 2004), the ambiguous authenticity of the genuine/fake distinction (Hietanen et al. 2020), marketing’s narrow, utilitarian–economic conception of value (Fitchett and Saren 1998), and the foundations of ostensibly normative judgements about market interaction (Østergaard and Fitchett 2012). Other work has traced how advertising conceives of a seductive and dream-like desire (Askegaard 2010; Yakhlef 1999) and has recently pointed out the self-destructive hyperreality inherent in the ethos of work and associated market inequality (Goff 2024; Goff and Chenault 2025). Beyond these contributions there is not much by the way of extensive encounters, and Baudrillard’s relentless attack on needs, utility, meaning, and the pataphysical notions of the seductive, ecstatic, banal, and fatal continue to receive little attention. Even more strikingly, several engagements with Baudrillard’s work are coloured by both misreadings and hasty rejections of his work. Truly simulationary recreations of Baudrillard celebrating “consumers as inventive bricoleurs who assert their independence and control through a variety of conscious marketplace practices” (Bernthal, Crockett and Rose 2005, 134), where consumers “are willing, creative participants in the marketplace who cooperate with marketers and marketplace institutions for the satisfaction of needs” (p. 134), reveal telling symptoms of the field’s wider discomfort. For their part, Firat and Venkatesh (1995) find it adequate to simply note that “we do not subscribe to his pessimistic conclusion” (p. 251) and to move on. Such responses to Baudrillard’s radicalism work to persistently reproduce a flattery of existing assumptions and to foreclose the very confrontation his work demands.

 

Our suspicion is that perhaps Baudrillard’s great crime is that he proves too honest, too revealing, and thus too dangerous for a field that is still enmeshed in forms of physics envy, naïve realism, and a deep investment in the productive sanctity of consumer meaning-making (also Ahlberg, Coffin and Hietanen 2022). Perhaps all of this is not surprising – Baudrillard, drawing in complex ways from Marx, Veblen, Mauss, Bataille and a broad range of psychoanalytic theory, is not easy reading for academic utility. Instead, the reader encounters a persistent air of fatalistic hyperbole that renounces answers, therapeutics, and affirmations. While diverse in the range of topics, styles, and theorising, a focal interest in the work follows how signification in consumer culture is constantly intensifying towards implosion and cataclysm. The totality in this logic is not to be taken lightly. For Baudrillard, there is no plausible outside to the system of signs, and all critique gets quickly reinserted into the system that indiscriminately feeds off itself.

 

These themes emerge incrementally across Baudrillard’s body of work as he moves increasingly from the logic of production to a lurid embrace of consumption. In Consumer Society (1998) the idea of consumption as the satisfaction of needs is unsettled and instead theorised as a system of signs that exposes how everyday objects organise social differentiation. Symbolic Exchange and Death (2017) radicalises his critique of the political economy by opposing symbolic exchange to the structural logic of value, foregrounding death as a challenge to the linear narratives of modernity and progress. The Ecstasy of Communication (2012) pushes this further, tracing how the proliferation of communicative networks and technologies collapses any remaining distance between subject and world into an obscene overexposure where meaning and reality implode. What remains is a plasticene mania of a culture pursuing its own excessive collapse. Meaning escalates to the point of its own undoing, distinctions become increasingly untenable, concepts bleed into one another, and what once held things apart quietly ceases to hold. Appearance replaces all depth, not just in consumption, but in the very way the world presents itself to any subjectivity in the making. Truth and falsity, the real and the fake, winners and losers are all swallowed in the hysteric flow of capitalist accumulation (also Porter 1993) and a consumer culture that only runs on a relentless cyclical production of its productive capacity. Baudrillard’s later writings take an increasingly esoteric turn – as if he is dissolving into the very tendency he intensified.

 

For his relentless theorising, Baudrillard has been described as a “dangerous writer whose position needs to be entirely rejected” (Gane 2017, 16, describing Douglas Kellner’s complicated position on Baudrillard), and an enemy of science, whose work ought to be sneered at as a “crescendo of nonsense” (Sokal and Bricmont 1998, 151). Even from within intellectual traditions of social critique closer to his own, his inherent negativity and lack of any affirmatory solution has been seen as politically impotent, historically one-sided (King 1998), and “bleakly fatalist” (Poster 2002, 5). Equally, the vertiginous speed of his narrative and his avoidance of “any kind of empirical investigation” (Sandywell 1995, 143) does not sit well with sociological sensibilities. Furthermore, Baudrillard’s ‘chameleon figure’ (Rojek and Turner 1993), like the theory it produces, is constantly performing evasive manoeuvres, often obscuring any ‘true nature’ of his rhetorical intentions. This signature ironic style attained him monikers like philosopher clown (Poole 2007) and has resulted in various misreadings of his provocations. Remorseless claims to reality such as: “I might wish Baudrillard a car crash or two […] He needs a little pain (maybe a lot) to bring him to his senses” (Sobchack 1991, 329) highlight the stakes in play, while also serving as a glowing reminder of the goading nature of his ‘evil genius’ (Bishop and Phillips 2007).

 

Yet, none of these remarks have been able to dilute the potently revealing excesses in Baudrillard’s oeuvre. When the object of analysis is a culture of constant implosion, the centripetal infusion of appearances, an inescapable mirror of consumer culture as an extreme social form is put on display. It is a description of our being in late capitalism which is not neatly given in data and thus offers only ‘impossible’ outcomes. Thus, many have also seen a reason to celebrate aspects of Baudrillard’s radicality. There is a sense in which “he goes to the root of things, he attacks and rejects all existing orthodoxies, and he appears to carry out a relentless critique of everything existing” (Kellner 1987, 126). The question then remains, if everything is so total, so immanently manic, and so nihilistically implosive, what should we do with Baudrillard today? What to do with something that continues to have “not yet been understood” (Pawlett 2007, 171)?

 

One possible starting point is to accept Baudrillard’s invitation to play with serious excesses, to respond to his challenge and to willingly stake that which guarantees our realities in interpretive marketing and consumer research. Baudrillard readily turns our attention to how all social inquiry is inherently grounded in a pursuit of utility and transparency, seeking to reproduce a social system that unbeknownst of its own detriment imagines doing away with all its excesses that we find ourselves swimming in. It seems to us, that without a keen sensibility to the excessive, we will likely continue to be caught off guard by consumption phenomena we can only then label as irrational. We inhabit a generalised mania where the alibi of use is at work everywhere for things of no use apart from their signs. To account for any of this, we need a way to address the inherent excess of signs beyond meaning – as an intense productivity where significations of consumer culture are increasingly bleeding into each other.

 

For example, the emergence of sustainability as a megatrend has shown how environmental action passes from a set of practices aimed to address ecological limits into a hyperreal system of signs that reproduce themselves regardless of material outcomes or reference to any biophysical reality. The more something becomes ‘sustainable’, the more its sustainability starts to vanish into its own signification and the more its ‘reality’ retreats. Not because it is unreal, but because it is overexposed. As such, the reality of climate change becomes one where its “excess of reality [...] puts an end to reality, just as the excess of information puts an end to information” (Baudrillard 2001, 65-66). For if criticality involves pointing out such crises, Baudrillard’s theory is not critical but catastrophical, a register that is specifically attuned to how “events attain their effects without passing through causes” (Baudrillard 2008, 192). When the systemic causes become illegible or inaccessible, what fills the space is a proliferation of their effects as aestheticised and spectacularised forms that reproduce the conditions of the original crisis while providing the affective satisfaction of resistance.

 

In our predicament, could then what Baudrillard introduced as fatal strategies bring about new considerations to our impasse of capitalist realism and to the inherent naivety of simple emancipatory affirmations? Prompted against banal strategies, where the subject attempts to master and control the world by inserting itself at the centre as a rational agent capable of interpretation, resistance, and subversion – given the insatiable quality of the system to engross and appropriate that which opposes it – fatal strategies emerge from an awareness of “the cunning genius of the object, in the ecstatic form of the pure object, and in its victorious strategy

over the subject” (Baudrillard 1988, 185). As such, they are marked by a move of abandoning the subject’s losing game and instead siding with the object, letting the system’s own logic run to its fatal excess rather than trying to resist or master it from within. Here theory ought to become fatal itself through injections of the absurd capable of challenging the object’s power. By playing along, can the system of signs be conjured towards its demise through a potentially ruinous gambit relying on its own logic, where in the end “[e]ven signs must burn” (Baudrillard 2019, 169)? To contemplate this seemingly impossible possibility is to follow Baudrillard’s accelerationist impulse towards the point where dominant systems are pushed to the point of reversibility and begin to undermine themselves. What might this clandestine impulse mean for us today?

 

In addition to the tentative starting points mentioned above, we welcome all kinds of Baudrillardian critiques and contributions on studies of consumption, marketing, consumer culture, and social sciences in a broad sense. We are looking for what has to date been repressed, avoided, and tempered – all that which remains too revealing of our contemporary situation and too cunning to ever be satisfied with an affirmation.

 

For any inquiries, please contact Joel Hietanen at joel.hietanen@helsinki.fi or Onni Tulensalo at onni.tulensalo@aalto.fi.

 

 

References

 

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