Revolution is impossible and materiality is dead.

It is important to differentiate Baudrillard’s view from standard accounts of revolution. To be sure, this is the position from which Baudrillard emerges. In the early work, The Political Economy of the Sign, Baudrillard argued that the regime of the code could only be destroyed by a total revolution. ‘Even signs must burn’. Baudrillard’s early work can be read as a call for a Situationist-style overthrow of capitalism through a revolution in the everyday, which breaks the power of the code and of signs. In more recent works, Baudrillard rethinks this view. He claims that revolution is now impossible. Baudrillard makes this claim because of the end of production. Revolution was historically seen as the liberation of the productive energy of humanity from the confines of capitalism. But if production no longer exists, this kind of vision has no hold. Labour has become another sign. There is no tendency for it to liberate itself by moving beyond capitalism. Baudrillard is deeply critical of standard leftist responses to neoliberalism. He criticises revolutionaries of his day for seeking a return to the “real”. He sees this as nostalgia for the previous, Fordist period of capitalism. People seek to get rid of the code, and go back to the earlier kind of simulation. Or they seek to identify something which is not yet signified in the system and which ought to be – for instance, excluded groups who should be included. This actually ties people to the prior forms of the dominant system. For Baudrillard, the weapons of the previous period are already neutralised in the order of the code. Revolution is a casualty of the end of the period of system-expansion. Explosions and revolutions are effects of an expanding order. This expanding order is an effect of the regime of production. But simulation is instead an inward-looking order. It is ‘saturated’ – it cannot expand any further. As a result, explosion will never again happen. It has been replaced by the ‘cold’ energy of the simulacrum. Instead, there is constant implosion. The world is saturated. The system has reached its limits. It is socially constructed as dense and irreversible, as beyond the ‘liberating explosion’. Baudrillard believes that we are past a point of no return: the system can’t be slowed down or redirected to a new end. We are in a ‘pure event’, beyond causality and without consequence, and every effort to exorcise hyperreality simply reinforces it. These are little fractal events and gradual processes of collapse which no longer create massive collapses, but exist horizontally. Events no longer resonate across spheres. It is as if the forces carrying the meaning of an event beyond itself have slowed to a standstill. The London ‘riots’ or the student fees protests, for example, do not turn into generalised rebellions in Britain as perhaps they still might in Egypt or Greece. We are in an era of ‘anomalies without consequences’. But the system will nevertheless come to an end, by other means. Even if people can’t revolt, a reaction is certain. Explosive violence is replaced by implosive violence, arising from a saturated, retracting, involuting system. The system has lost its triumphal imaginary because of its saturation. It is now in a phase of mourning, passing towards catastrophe. Things don’t get transcended anymore, but they expand to excess. Baudrillard sees this as the culmination of a kind of negative evolution. Systems pass through stages: a loose state produces liberty or personal responsibility; a denser state produces security; an even denser state produces terror, generalised responsibility, and saturation. Beyond saturation there is only implosion. Anti-consumerism is another target of critique. Criticising consumer society for doing what it claims to do – for supplanting ‘higher’ virtues with everyday pleasures – is a false critique which reinforces the core myth of consumerism. Consumer society functions as it does, precisely because it does not provide everyday pleasures. Rather, it simulates them through the code. Baudrillard also criticises moral critique and scandal, such as Watergate. He argues that the system requires a moral superstructure to operate, and the revival of such a superstructure sustains the system. What is really scandalous is that capital is fundamentally immoral or amoral. Moral panics serve to avoid awareness of this repressed fact. Similarly, critiques of ideology risk reaffirming the system’s maintenance of the illusion of truth. This helps cover up the fact that truth no longer exists in the world of the code. Since there is no reality beneath the simulacrum, such analyses are flawed.