Jean Baudrillard: Against Banality

In America, Baudrillard is regarded as a harsh critic of consumerism, globalization, and US foreign policy; the rest of the Western world knows him as a postmodernist, an enemy of Marxism, and an opponent of feminism. However, Pawlett (cultural studies, U. of Wolverhampton) focuses on Baudrillard's little-understood ideas about symbolic exchange and proves that his primary project is to develop the concept of symbolic spaces in which we can rid ourselves of social control. Pawlett gives new readers of Baudrillard a solid background in Baudrillard's ideas about the object system, the sign system and the consumption system, his rejection of Marxism, the tenets of his under-appreciated Symbolic Exchange and Death, his thought about the end of the social, his commentary on the devaluation of the body and sex, and his takes on war, terrorism, subjectivity, identity and agency. Annotation c2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

William Pawlett is a senior lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Wolverhampton. He received his PhD in Sociology from Loughborough University and is on the editorial board of The International Journal of Baudrillard Studies.