Cultural Revolution

Definition

"Cultural revolution" in Baudrillard names the terrain on which the system now reproduces itself and therefore the terrain on which it must be fought. Where classical capitalism socialized people "by force" and exploited them through labor, the third phase extends the system's expanded reproduction into culture, consumption, language, sexuality and the unconscious: "At all levels, the system is sick from desublimation, from liberalization, from tolerance, while seeking to transcend itself in order to survive. Consumption, satisfaction of needs, sexual liberation, women's rights, etc., etc.—it is prepared to grant anything in order to reduce social abstraction so that people will play the game" (ch. V, "Political Revolution and 'Cultural' Revolution"). The malady is not economic: "Its fatal malady is not its incapacity to reproduce itself economically and politically, but its incapacity to reproduce itself symbolically" (p. 144).

The strategic thesis follows from the diagnosis. Because the system's own strategy is the dialectic of political economy, a revolution that remains economic-political supplies that dialectic with its fuel: "The symbolic is the abolition of the imaginary of political economy (and of all other detached fields). In this sense, the cultural revolution is no longer tied to the economic-political revolution. … Because today the system has no better strategy than that of the dialectic of political economy, the cultural revolution must make itself against the economic-political revolution" (ch. V, "The Economic as Ideology and Simulation Model," pp. 150–151). The phrase is not a call for arts policy or for a separate "cultural" front; it marks the fact that the symbolic order — reversibility, loss, expenditure, speech that must be answered — is precisely what the system cannot produce. Hence the impossibility of symbolic participation: "the system is structurally incapable of liberating human potentials except as productive forces, that is, according to an operational finality that leaves no room for the reversion of the loss, the gift, the sacrifice and hence for the possibility of symbolic exchange" (ch. V, "Political Revolution and 'Cultural' Revolution"). Cardan's formula, which Baudrillard adopts with a reservation about the word's contractual connotations, is that the fundamental contradiction is no longer between productive forces and relations of production but "in the impossibility of having people 'participate.'"

Why "sick from desublimation"? Because the liberalization that looks like liberation is "only hyper-repressive": needs "which were once contingent and heterogeneous are homogenized and definitively rationalized" (ch. V, "Political Revolution and 'Cultural' Revolution"). Consumption demonstrates the pattern — it is the system's attempt at a festival that cannot be a festival: "To consume is to start producing again. All that is expended is in fact invested; nothing is ever totally lost" (p. 145). Even squandered wealth "cannot stop having this lead to a widening reproduction." The system cannot let anything be lost, and that incapacity is fatal in the long run, since what it cannot reproduce is the cycle of giving, receiving and returning. "What haunts the system is the symbolic demand": "nothing can be given without being returned, nothing is ever won without something being lost, nothing is ever produced without something being destroyed, nothing is ever spoken without being answered" (p. 146). The cultural revolution is the name for a politics addressed to that demand — which is why it is not a supplement to economic revolution but its rival.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: the cultural revolution "must make itself against the economic-political revolution"; the system's malady is its "incapacity to reproduce itself symbolically"; consumption as the expansion of production by other means.
• Karl Marx — the economic-political revolution whose dialectic Baudrillard says has become the system's own strategy, and therefore cannot break it.
• Henri Lefebvre — the theorist of the colonization of everyday life, whose everyday is the scale at which the system's expansion into culture and consumption is lived; Baudrillard is his student and critic.
• Theodor Adorno — the adjacent Frankfurt diagnosis of a culture industry that administers what it liberates, the affinities Poster notes between Baudrillard and the Frankfurt School.
• Walter Benjamin — the culture-theoretical register within which the wiki has posed the question of art, technology and reproduction.
• Cornelius Castoriadis ("Cardan") — cited for the reformulation of the fundamental contradiction as the "impossibility of having people 'participate'" (with Baudrillard's objection to the word's rationalism). Not yet paged.

Related Concepts

• Capitalism — the system whose expanded reproduction into culture and consumption is the object of the cultural revolution; the wiki's theme page carries the production-centred account this concept contests.
• Semiocapitalism — the political-economic form in which valorization runs through signs, language and affect: the cultural revolution's contemporary terrain.
• Colonization of Everyday Life — the everyday-scale process by which the system extends into the spheres the concept names.
• Revolution as Finality — the economic-political rival: a revolution deferred to history's end which, for Baudrillard, exorcizes immediate subversion.
• Consumerism — the system's attempted festival, and the proof that it cannot lose anything.
• Symbolic Exchange — the "symbolic demand" that haunts the system and that its liberalization cannot satisfy.
• Repression — the structural term whose "desublimation" Baudrillard applies to the system's own liberalization, following Marcuse.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — the concept's defining statement: "the cultural revolution must make itself against the economic-political revolution" (ch. V, "The Economic as Ideology and Simulation Model," pp. 150–151); "Its fatal malady is not its incapacity to reproduce itself economically and politically, but its incapacity to reproduce itself symbolically" (ch. V, "Political Revolution and 'Cultural' Revolution," p. 144); "To consume is to start producing again. All that is expended is in fact invested; nothing is ever totally lost" (p. 145); and "what haunts the system is the symbolic demand" (p. 146).
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• Is the cultural revolution a politics or a diagnosis? Baudrillard gives the phrase an adversary — the economic-political revolution — but no program. The wiki should ask what a politics of symbolic demand could be, and whether symbolic-exchange supplies it.
• How does this differ from the wiki's other "cultural" turns? The colonization-of-everyday-life and semiocapitalism pages describe the same extension of capital without Baudrillard's symbolic criterion. Does the concept add an argument, or a slogan — and can the pages be kept from duplicating each other?
• Desublimation: liberation or its counterfeit? Baudrillard follows Marcuse in reading liberalization as "hyper-repressive," yet the wiki's material on consumption, sexuality and women's rights is often read as genuine gain. Where does the page stand between them?
• "Sick from desublimation" — whose illness? The metaphor attributes a malady to the system, not to its subjects. Does the concept require a systemic teleology (the system "seeking to transcend itself in order to survive") that Baudrillard elsewhere disowns?