Baudrillard's Noble Anthropology: The Image of Symbolic Exchange in Political Economy

Marx's of political has itself suffered a number of critiques in this century. Since the late 1960's have seen a number of such critiques in France, no doubt in partial reaction to the rise of a revitalized marxism prior to 1968 and its subsequent decline in many intellectual circles. As a subject of analysis, discussions of political economy almost inevitably touch upon questions of an anthropological nature, this at times in their concern for a universal man, at other times simply in their effort to contrast the interplay of economy and polity in a perspective of cross-cultural breadth and historical depth. Baudrillard's Le Miroir de la production seeks to follow the latter route in its twoprong criticism of dialectical materialism and political economy. Marx makes a radical critique of political economy, are told, but he makes it still in the form of political economy; the anticipated response is thus no surprise: we must move to a radically different level, beyond its critique, to the definitive resolution of political (40).1 The argument thus develops substantially beyond marxism and political economy to a discussion of what Baudrillard entitles symbolic exchange, a concept seemingly owing much to the social exchange emphasis of French sociology from Mauss to Levi-Strauss. But as wielded by Baudrillard, the concept reveals itself as something in fact less systematic, less sociological, and considerably more radical in its opposition with the subsequently developed view of modern society. This is, as I will argue below, no doubt the concept's rhetorical function. But it is a function that achieves its goal of saving primitive society from the categories of modern political economy and marxism only at the rather dubious expense of an idealized primitivism and a denigrated modernity. It is the profundity of this break, to parody Althusser's earlier-vaunted epistemological break, that gives Baudrillard's criticism of contemporary political economy its force. But examination of the two major movements in Baudrillard's critique-the criticism of the categories of political economy and the assertion of the sociological distinctiveness of primitiveness-might suggest that here, as elsewhere, one need be cautious with analytically-acclaimed ruptures profondes.