thing like: “primitives” = “cannibals” = “Catholic rugby team”. This
crossover would seem to suggest that the absolute Other has always
been the same, and that the same has always been the absolute Other.
Put another way, Baudrillard is trying to oppose Western society with
something drawn from its own conceptual and ideological framework.
In answer to the question “Where are the ‘primitive’ peoples?”, the
answer must be: They have vanished, or they were never there in the
first place. And this is why Baudrillard’s continual reference to “primi-
tive” societies must be closely examined and watched out for at all
times: when he claims to be looking at “primitive” societies, he is often
only articulating Western myths and structures concerning the Other.
He claims to access something radically different from the West, when
his statements on “primitive” societies are based firmly upon the West.
Critics have discussed Symbolic Exchange and Death as Baudrillard’s
last “real” book, with virtually everything produced afterwards
suffering from a “permanent misunderstanding” (Gane, 1993: 189). In
his introduction to Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of The Real, Butler
discusses this point at length, noting that Symbolic Exchange and Death is
regarded as:
… the last of Baudrillard’s books that is observational, empirical, scientific. It is
the last that comes out of his discipline, that could be taught in a conventional
course, in sociology. Death … is a real object, something that exists out there
in the world before it is written about. It is a topic that can be measured, of
which a history can be constructed, that is not simply a fabrication of
Baudrillard himself. Henceforth, Baudrillard’s work becomes fictional, inven-
tive, “pataphysical”.
(1993: 5)
Mike Gane notes that it is in Symbolic Exchange and Death that
Baudrillard expresses “…his argument in more orthodox terms”
(1993: xiii). While the latter is undoubtedly true, the reading of
Baudrillard’s “primitivism” presented here undermines the notion that
Symbolic Exchange and Death presents “observational, empirical, [and]
scientific” material. One way of addressing the perceived differences
between the earlier, supposedly “sociological” work and the later
“performative” writing involves a simple comparison for “truth”
content. Fatal Strategies (first published 1983; translation 1990b)
contains a number of references to “primitives” and the potlatch (or
N A R R AT I V E S O F P R I M I T I V I S M 61

It is important, however, not to confuse them with other deserts, other
landscapes:
The American desert is an extraordinary piece of drama, though in no sense is
it theatrical like an Alpine landscape, nor sentimental like the forest or the
countryside. Nor eroded and monotonous like the sub-lunar Australian desert.
Nor mystical, like the deserts of Islam. It is purely, geologically dramatic,
bringing together the sharpest, most ductile shapes with the gentlest, most
lascivious underwater forms – the whole metamorphism of the earth’s crust is
present in synthesis, in a miraculous abridged version.
(1988a: 69)
Baudrillard is careful to distinguish between landscapes here, because
he wishes to reveal the difference between those deserts which have
entered mythology or theology through centuries of human cartog-
raphy and shifts in imperial or colonial power (like the deserts in
Ondaatje’s The English Patient), and those deserts where the human
subject is merely an actor or player in a pre-existing scene. Another
AM E R I C A A N D P O S T M O D E R N I S M 111
SEMIOTICS
Semiotics can be thought of as a “science of signs” (see “structuralism” :
p. 15). While it is an approach that has parallels with structuralism, the
main difference is that semioticians search for the logical rules or laws of
signs and sign-systems. Semiotics is therefore a more formal and “purist”
approach. However, for all its scientific pretensions, for example with the
analysis and modelling of communication systems, it would be more accu-
rate to think of semiotics as a “pseudo-science” or theory. Apart from the
importance of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), one of the “founding
fathers” of semiotics was Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), who
equated logic with the science of signs (see Hawkes, 1977: 126). One of the
key components of Peirce’s system is that of the triad of signs called the
icon, index and symbol. The icon is a sign that bears a similarity to the
object (such as a painting), an index is a sign that has a material relation-
ship with the object (such as smoke signifying fire), and a symbol has an
arbitrary relationship with the object (the symbolic sign, in other words, is
constructed through a cultural system).