ARTICOLI / 3 / Francesco Piluso /
Jean Baudrillard provides a semiotic perspective on our consumer society by reinterpreting the Marxist categories of political economy in structuralist terms. According to Baudrillard, the sign-form is characterized by the same relative, systemic and abstractive logic which characterizes the commodity-form. A parallelism between these two forms permits to overcome the Marxist dialectic between economy and culture, and to relocate the ideology in the process of reproduction of the same structural and differential form (exchange-value and logic of signifiers) behind the alibi of the production of positive value (use-value and signified). Once Baudrillard revealed the naturalized and ideological role of the use-value, it seems paradoxical that the same author collapses signified and referent on the same plane in the shadow of the signifiers form. We will try to comprehend and criticize this complex theoretical passage in properly semiotic terms, to highlight how an ambivalent stress on the concept of form has progressively lead the author to an ontological plane of analysis which betrays the same formal premises of the semiotic theory and of the early Baudrillard.
