Baudrillard Unwound: The Duplicity of Post-Marxism and Deconstruction

The paper comprises two readings of the work of Jean Baudrillard. The first, by Richard Smith, locates itself amid the polarization of debate between Marxism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism, which he claims is both ill-judged and unproductive. In contrast to this standoff Smith argues the case for a ‘transgenic’ or ‘transversal’ post-Marxism by demonstrating that the oft-repeated claims for an ‘epistemological break’ between an early, Marxian Baudrillard and a later, postmodern Baudrillard are not borne out by the evidence. Rather, Smith foregrounds the continuity of Baudrillard's work by highlighting how an antagonistic entwining of the semiotic and the symbolic structures Baudrillard's oeuvre. Crucially, Smith suggests that the possibilities of post-Marxism will only come into clear view once the semiotic logic at the heart of ‘the general political economy of the sign’ is freed from the Utopian mystique of symbolic exchange. In the second series of readings, Marcus Doel engages with the spacing at play with Baudrillard's and Smith's texts in an attempt to demonstrate that they are perpetually turning against themselves. By way of a series of angled, slanted, curvaceous, and suspended readings drawn from Althusser, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, and Lyotard, Doel deconstructs Smith's post-Marxism in order to affirm the irreducible, aleatory drift of Baudrillard's spiralling texts.