This is along the lines of what I've read in Victoria Grace's Baudrillard's Challenge. In her discussion of Butler she notes that Butler says:
The critique leveled by Grace, through Baudrillard, is that by claiming there is nothing outside of identity and difference Butler is positing the logic of identity itself as a kind of global subject. Grace points out that while Butler at times seeks to subvert identity, she also posits identity as having no outside. It should be noted that a lot of feminists have this problem- in Grace's book Irigaray and Braidotti are also featured.
In Forget Foucault, Baudrillard's point is that Foucault has made power into something transhistorical. The inevitability of power as productive for Baudrillard leaves no room for reversion and cuts out the role of death in our experience of life.
For Baudrillard, power is a challenge- for example, do what I want or I will kill you. It is indeed possible to rise to this challenge by embracing death and exposing the illusion of the power of the master. Instead, we all too often reduce life to survival, which gives us the idea that there are natural "needs"- I "need" to survive, for example. But why? So we can see that our idea of power as productive only holds when the challenge of power is refused, when the dominated accepts submission.
I've been reading Baudrillard's latest works (Spirit of Terrorism, Agony of Power, Carnival and Cannibal) and I do think he's on to some stuff. Part of the problem is the debate about what aspects of Marx's work need to be updated. Baudrillard puts it to us that there may have been one or two revolutions in the value form since Marx: the first shifted primacy from production to consumption and the second corresponds to a "viral" character of value which he now sees as radiating out in all directions.
Of course, regular Marxists recoil at the questioning of materialist dogma. On the other hand, there's the question of how well Marxists actually do understand the economy and the world which gives rise to it.
What I like about Baudrillard's book is that he encourages us to think of the world as a giant potlatch- a challenge where everyone is challenged to bring the best gift. In this way the commodity form is not only about standardizing objects to meet use values, but also seduction, leading people astray in the sense of becoming convinced that the stakes lie where they not.
I don't think Baudrillard really lays out a program, but his challenges to Marxism are good ones, I think. In general the question of postmodernisms can be counter-posed to one of postmodernity. Do you think there is a shift from modernity to post-modernity?
One thing that strikes me is that everyone thinks modernism was about reason and certainty, but modernism is the era of stuff like Picasso, WWI, Finnegan's Wake, etc. It seems to me like people put onto postmodernism a lot of the stuff that is actually modernist. To me the "postmodern era" in terms of lack of faith in dominant metanarratives has to be traced to 1914, the year in which the story of the happy nation-station came to a screeching halt.
