ABSTRACT
In Baudrillard's observations the field of political economy generalizes and saturates itself through the system of use value. Baudrillard demonstrates that use-value is an effect of exchange-value. Baudrillard largely avoids the economic reductionism that plagues Williamson's analysis and thus advances our understanding of cultural politics and advertising in postmodern times. In the twentieth century, advances in advertising aesthetics witnessed the emergence of the commodity-sign and this precipitated a revolution in advertising promotions. Many of Baudrillard's observation concerning the second-order of simulacra coincide with the controlled logic of the commodity-sign and its location in the new consumer society of modernist self-identity. Baudrillard observes that the thrill of advertising has been displaced onto computers and onto the miniaturization of everyday life by computer science. While Baudrillard's observations, appear consistent with contemporary media developments, his account of the intransigence of the code of signification governing advertising visual cultures insufficiently appreciates transgression as a medium of global advertising cultures.
