Although he attempted the agregation he did not succeed, nor did he ever succeed (he has now retired) in gaining a permanent university post. The milieu was not an intellectual one, and Baudrillard worked hard at the lyce´e to compensate for this, becoming the first of his family to do intellectual work in a serious way. While his grandparents were peasants, his own family was in transition to an urban life and jobs in the civil service. The code certainly refers to computerisation, and to digitalisation, but it is also fundamental in physics, biology and other natural sciences where it enables a perfect reproduction of the object or situation for this reason the code enables a by-passing of the real and opens up what Baudrillard has famously designated as ‘ hyperreality’.Īlthough Baudrillard preferred to be without a background (see letter in Gane 1993: 6), it is possible to ascertain that he was born in 1929 in Reims, the same town as his intellectual mentor, Georges Bataille. Finally, from his writings of the mid-1970s onwards, starting with Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard has taken up the radical consequences, as he sees them, of the pervasiveness of the code in late-modern societies. In the second major phase of his work, Baudrillard argues that even the notion of the sign as a vehicle of meaning and signification is too reductive rather, the Saussure of the anagrams, where words seem to emerge mysteriously, and almost magically, through the letters, is more in keeping with the way language works. Starting with a re-evaluation and critique of Marx’s economic theory of the object, especially as concerns the notion of ‘use-value’, Jean Baudrillard develops the first major phase of his work with a semiotically based theory of production and the object, one that emphasises the ‘sign-value’ of objects. The object of exchange-value is what Marx called the commodity form of the object. The use-value of an object would be its utility related in Marx’s terms to the satisfaction of certain needs exchange-value, on the other hand, would refer to the market-value of a product, or object measured by its price. Certainly, for a time, Marx was able to provide a relatively plausible explanation of the growth of capitalism using just these categories.

In a society dominated by production, Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) argues, the difference between use-value and exchange-value has some pertinence.

Baudrillard the system of objects