AT: Simulacrum

Analytics
Baudrillard destroys feminism. Feminists would demand consideration of the plan, even though it might be indeterminate and unstable.
Sara Ahmed, Lecturer in Womans Studies, Lancaster U, Hypatia, vol. 11, no. 2, p. 90-91, 1996 ]-AC My readings of Baudrillards and Lyotards postmodern narratives have suggested that the terms on which the postmodern is constructed are antagonistic to the aims of feminist theory and practice. Feminisms constitutive belief that gender inequality structures all aspects of social life (from which many deviations and differences exist between feminists) has certain theoretical implications. The belief recognizes the delimitation of difference and possibilities by structural relations of power and constraint. I have suggested that both Baudrillard and Lyotard stress the instability and indeterminacy of signifying structures in a way that makes broad-scale categories such as gender impossible. In the case of Seduction, I have problematized Baudrillards shift from the argument that sexuality is nonreferential to the conclusion that sexual difference is indeterminate: a site of play that is unbounded. In relation to The Postmoder Condition and The Differend, I have suggested that Lyotards model of knowledge as determined only by the boundaries of its own production (paralogy) and his model of ethics as reducible to the value of radical differenece and otherness (the differend) are inadequate for dealing with large-scael institutional and power inequalities. My critical readings of Baudrillard and Lyotard may suggest that any introduction of feminism to such postmodern narratives would effect a major shift in their terms; it would interrupt or displace their stress on indeterminacy and instability. A feminist approach would require an analysis of how power relations are stabilized in specific historical moments (in the empirical form of male dominance), however much that stability is relative or provisional and itself open to contestation and change by the very discourse of feminism, by the force of our own strategies, our rhetoric, and our collective ambitions.

Baudrillard position surrenders to aesthetic nihilism Butterfield 99 Professor of English (Bradley, University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, Ethical value and
negative aesthetics: Reconsidering the Baudrillard-Ballard connection, PMLA, Vol 114, No 1, Special Topic: Ethics and Literary Study (Jan 1999), 64-77) Since moral agency is today constructed and enlisted by the great aestheticizing machines of the timesadvertising, politics, entertainment-moral revolutions must be waged in negative aesthetic terms and not on the grounds of some religious or other metaphysical first principle.10 For all postNietzschean thinkers see the preference even of life over death as arising from a prejudice rather than a truth. To live without a metaphysical value system is to face the facts as Nietzsche saw them: that life is dangerous; that there are no moral guarantees, only persons who must relate to other persons. Baudrillard thus endorses an immoral aesthetic as a way of reversing Pavlovian conditioning by mass-media technologies: "There was a time when immorality was recognized, from Machiavelli to Stendhal, and when somebody like Mandeville could show, in the eighteenth century, that a society could only be revolutionized through its vices, that it is its immorality that gives it its dynamism" (Symbolic Exchange 98). Does Baudrillard advocate immorality in real or only in imaginary (aesthetic) terms? Having declared that there is no longer a difference, he cannot have it both ways, so he must really mean what he says: that one should embrace immoral behavior, not just in art but in life as well. The best of Baudrillard's critics, including Douglas Kellner, Christopher Norris, Steven Best, Gary Genosko, and others, have faulted him for essentially this position-that is, for surrendering to an aesthetic nihilism and abandoning all grounds for moral or ethical reasoning.

Abandoning notions of the social allows it to reappear leaving us incapable of dealing with it Bogard 90, professor of Sociology, (William, Whitman College, Closing Down the Social: Baudrillards
Challenge to Contemporary Sociology, Sociological Theory, Vol 8, No 1 (Spring 1990), 1-15) Early in the nineteenth century, Auguste Comte had a clear vision of the role of social theory in changing the social order. Its purpose was to devise a plan for restructuring society-one that would steer society successfully between the twin evils of despotism and anarchy (Comte 1832). This plan, he argued, was to be the collective product of a morally refined and broadly educated social-scientific elite. At the end of the nineteenth century, Durkheim retained many vestiges of this Comtean faith (now stripped of its elitist tone), believing that sociological truths about society could be applied in the political realm to support the goal of social change, which in Durkheim's own case was a socialist State (cf. Lukes 1985, pp. 320-327). This heritage of social research informing social change, which marks not only French but virtually all sociological traditions in one form or another, has disappeared from the work of Baudrillard in a movement which has denied the social basis of contemporary society and thus society itself. If I have understood Baudrillard correctly, the call for social change in the present can no longer expect any assistance from social theory. Certainly, on an intellectual level at least, one can appreciate Baudrillard's claim that the social, in the traditional sense of that term, is disappearing, and that new and creative strategies of resistance are called for in the present. Undoubtedly, theory must remain flexible enough to challenge new conditions. But theoretical flexibility is not enhanced by simply discarding the theoretical tradition. Baudrillard, of all persons, should know that theoretical change has much in common with the cycles of fashion-what's old today is new tomorrow. If Baudrillard's challenge reduces, in the face of contemporary culture, to the simple question ' 'why do sociology? ", perhaps the answer is to be prepared for the day when the social reappears.

Baudrillards positions cannot serve as guiding theory

Bogard 90, professor of Sociology, (William, Whitman College, Closing Down the Social: Baudrillards
Challenge to Contemporary Sociology, Sociological Theory, Vol 8, No 1 (Spring 1990), 1-15) Baudrillard's hypotheses cannot be said to derive from a theory of the social (or society). Perhaps it is better to say they derive from a theory of the present in which the productive energy of the social has been completely absorbed into the mass. But what has happened to theory itself in this process? What significant transformations has it undergone and what traditional functions has it been forced to abandon? Baudrillard is typically ambivalent-which is to say he responds with a range of possibilitieswhen it comes to these questions. Each of his short commentaries on theory approach the topic differently, and each in a fractured style that continually works at cross purposes with itself. On different occasions, he refers to theory as, among other things, a "mode" of disappearance, as a "challenge" to the real, as seduction, as a "fatal strategy," and as simulation (cf. Baudrillard 1987, pp. 122-135; 1988a, p. 198; 1988c, pp. 98ff.). Given such opaque images, it comes as no surprise when Baudrillard himself admits to never having adequately formulated his own position on the question of the function of theory (Baudrillard 1987, p. 125).