ABSTRACT
Baudrillard's analysis of communication in consumer capitalism insists on the continuing power of the commodity form. Overturning the ideological regime of realism, decentering and dispersing the transcendental essentialism which masks the operation of symbolic processes, is no guarantee of an unreified social form of life. Transferring emphasis to the significatory level of social life heightens the inevitability of the transparency of this alteration. Both the compositional process and the solidified product are now more openly matters of signification. Baudrillard's emphasis on the commodification of the sign in mass consumption is potentially misleading for a theory of practice. The rise of informationalism as a social form paralleling the rise of textualism as an intellectual movement is neither a direct nor full equivalent. The post-industrial paradigm has inspired extensive empirical work that specifies some of the details of the information society. The mass cultural content through which integrated individual identities are still socially produced are through newer myths of late capitalism.
