Capitalism accelerates consumerism to the point of hyperreality – an existence in which culture has been commodified extensively where there exists no value outside of production.

For him, we live in a consumer society wherein traditional Marxist analysis fails to capture the status of objects. Commodities post-1945 have a communicational structure that can only be captured by a semiotics that relies not on a referential model akin to Charles Peirce, but rather a differential one like Saussure. Baudrillard's semiotics combines aspects of Freud and Saussure to show how in the commodity, word and image is related to desire, rather than use value or utility. Symbols provide the codes that differentiate one consumer product from another. Upon consumption, symbols then transfer meaning from the product to its consumer. Moreover, as a poststructuralist, the free-play of this semiotics is potentially endless, and provides the consumer with a strong sense of freedom and self-determination within the hyperreality of the new semiotic condition of consumer society. It is hyperreality because in Baudrillard's system one cannot get outside of the fantasies and desires generated by consumer consumption within the system of objects. In Baudrillard's economy of signs, individuals are not making consumption choices based on tastes in a marketplace of products. Rather, consumer objects are codes that function within a system of signs. Following Saussure's principles, signs become meaningful only when differentiated from other signs—not by reference to an external reality. Within this system of signs, consumer objects are able to generate desire without corresponding to need or use value. For Baudrillard, the mode of production of a society requires an expansion of consumer consumption in order for it to be reproduced. The dependency of the reproduction of the mode of production on the reproduction of the act of consumption thus becomes a new development in capitalism. In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972), Baudrillard works out a poststructuralist theory of language that can supplement Marxism. In Saussure, the signifier and the signified are distinct and are only arbitrarily related. Signs then take on value through their relationship with other signs in the system. Baudrillard, however, argues that we should reverse Saussure's process, that is, we should begin [End Page 87] our theory of language from the combination of the signifier and the signified replete with systemic value. To do otherwise is to use the signified as an excuse to render signifier and signified as distinct. For him, political economy mirrors Saussure's separation of signifier and signified before their combination in the sign by its separation of use value from exchange value before their combination in the commodity. "By giving the Sr [Signifier] and the Sd [Signified] 'in equivalence' as constitutive agencies (instances) of the sign," comments Baudrillard, Saussure's theory of the sign "veils the strategic apparatus of the sign, which rests precisely on the disparity of the two terms and on the fundamental circularity of the dominant term" (Simulacres 156). He then explains in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign: The Signifier-Referent is taken for an original reality, a substance of value and recurring finality through the supporting play of signifiers … Similarly, use value is given as origin and purpose (finalité), and needs as the basic motor of the economic cycle—the cycle of exchange value appearing here as a necessary detour, but incompatible with true finalities … In reality, this moral and metaphysical privilege of contents (Use Value and Signifier-Referent) only masks the decisive privilege of form (Exchange Value and Signifier). (156) Baudrillard argues that the political economy of the sign needs to keep use value and exchange value together in the commodity, rather than make use value into a "mask" or excuse for exchange value. This reversal of the theory of the sign not only undermines structuralism, but it also undermines Marxism by radically altering its theory of the commodity. Ultimately, Baudrillard not only rejects structuralism, but also Marxism. He offers in its place a theory of the sign as the mode of signification within capitalism. From The Mirror of Production (1973) onward, Baudrillard regards his critique of the political economy of the sign not as supplementing Marxism, but rather replacing it. Moreover, Baudrillard regards Marxism not as a critique of capitalism, but rather as its highest form of ideology. In addition, he believes that his own critique of the political economy of the sign is sufficiently distanced from Marxism in order to provide capitalism with a proper critique. One of the differences between Baudrillard's semiology and those of Saussure and Roland Barthes is that he provides a diachronic account of the formation of language usage, whereas their accounts are primarily synchronic. His diachronic account begins with pre-industrial society, where he says there were signs attached to referents and that the referents of these signs were subject to reversal. This began to change however in the Renaissance, which for him is the historical period when "the sign" emerged. For Baudrillard, the rise of capitalism was a reflection of these [End Page 88] changes in modes of signification. By the late twentieth-century, the sign became completely separated from the referent. Signs are now more like traffic signals, that is, they emit a meaning but it is not a meaning to which one responds linguistically: the code tells us that red light means stop and that nothing more needs to be said in response to this signal. This code extracts signifieds from the social and recirculates them in media such as television as floating signifiers. The code itself might be regarded as the entire system of political economy including the rules through which the sign values of commodities are produced and regulated. In 1976, Baudrillard published Symbolic Exchange and Death (L'échange symbolique et la mort), where he challenged Marxist theoretical tradition by favoring symbolic exchange over economic exchange. For Baudrillard, the symbolic exchange of precapitalist societies is much less limited than the economic exchange of capitalist and socialist societies. Rather than emphasizing the values of utility, production, and instrumental rationality, Baudrillard instead argues that we should look to the values of giving, expenditure, and sacrifice. In part, these latter values are derived from the anthropology of George Bataille, which Baudrillard argues posits an alternative form of economy that replaces the capitalist imperatives of labor, savings, and utility with ones derived from the pleasure humans find in things such as waste, sacrifices, expenditure, and festivities. Through Bataille, Baudrillard comes to view humans as characterized by an excess of drives, needs, fantasies, energies, and desires, which is a way very different from the one envisioned by Freud and psychoanalysis.