Jean Baudrillard

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Jean Baudrillard (born July 29, 1929) is a cultural theorist and philosopher. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism.

1 Life
2 Introduction to work
3 Critiques of Baudrillard
4 Bibliography
5 External links

Life

He was born in Reims, France. He studied German at the Sorbonne University in Paris and taught German in a lycée (1958–1966). He worked as a translator and critic and continued to study philosophy and sociology. In 1966 he completed his Ph.D. thesis: 'Thèse de troisième cycle: Le Système des objets' ('Third cycle thesis: The system of objects') under the tuition of Henri Lefebvre. From 1966 to 1972 he worked as Maître Assistant (Assistant) and Maître de Conférences en Sociologie (Assistant Professor). In 1972 he finished his habilitation 'L'Autre par lui-même'. ('The other by himself'.) and started teaching Sociology at the Université de Paris-X Nanterre as a professor. From 1986 to 1990 Baudrillard served as Directeur Scientifique (Scientific Director) at IRIS (Institut de Recherche et d'Information Socio-Économique) at the Université de Paris-IX Dauphine. Since 2001 he has been a professor of philosophy of culture and media criticism at the European Graduate School. He continues to support the Institut de Recherche sur l'Innovation Sociale at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

Introduction to work

Jean Baudrillard is famous for his investigations into hyperreality, and in particular hyperreality in America. According to Baudrillard, America has constructed itself a world that is more 'real' than Real, and where those inhabiting it are obsessed with timelessness, perfection, and objectification of the self. Furthermore, authenticity has been replaced by copy (thus reality is replaced by a substitute), and nothing is "real," though those engaged in the illusion are incapable of seeing it. Instead of having experiences, people observe spectacles, via real or metaphorical control screens. Instead of the real, we have simulation and simulacra.

Shortly before the Gulf War, Baudrillard predicted that the war would not actually happen. After the war, he claimed he had been correct, and that no war had taken place. The reality of the war, where people fight for a cause and are killed, had been replaced by a 'copy' war that is delivered to televisions across the world where no fighting is taking place. America was engaged in an illusion that it was fighting, much as the mind engages with a video game, where the experience tricks the consciousness into believing it is an active participant in something that is not happening. So while the combat may have been real, only a few people experienced it and they were on the other side of the world. The 'war' that was broadcast on television, and therefore the war as it is understood by the majority of people, was not actually real. The real conflict, according to Baudrillard, was not a war with Iraq over the invasion of Kuwait but a greater question concerning the concept of war. The first Gulf War served as a crisis point determining whether or not war was still possible in the post-industrial age.

Precession of Simulacra

In his essay 'The Precession of the Simulacra', Baudrillard recalls a tale by Borges in which a map (i.e. a representation) is produced so detailed that it ends up coming into one-to-one correspondence with the territory (i.e. everything that had once been directly lived), but argues that in the postmodern epoch, the territory ceases to exist, and there is nothing left but the map; or indeed, the very concepts of the map and the territory have become indistinguishable, the distinction which once existed between them having been erased.

Baudrillard's Object Value System

Baudrillard was heavily influenced by the works of Karl Marx. Like many other philosophers of consumer society, Baudrillard was particularly influenced by Marx's discussion of commodity fetishism, and much of his earlier work was an attempt to re-articulate the logic of commodity fetishism through a post-Marxist frame of reference that took seriously twentieth century developments in linguistic structuralism. Part of this rearticulation involved what Baudrillard called the "four logics of objects." He developed four categories for the value of commodities:

The functional value of an object is its instrumental purpose. (A pen writes. A diamond ring adorns an otherwise empty hand.) This is what Marx referred to as the 'use-value' of the commodity.
The exchange value of an object is its economic value. (A pen is worth three pencils. A diamond ring is worth three months' salary.)
The symbolic exchange value of an object is its arbitrarily assigned and agreed value in relation to another subject. (A pen represents a graduation present or a speaker's gift. A diamond ring symbolizes a public declaration of love between two individuals.)
The sign exchange value of an object represents its value in a system of objects. (A pen is part of a desk set, or a particular pen confers social status. A diamond ring has sign exchange value in relation to other diamond rings, conferring social status to the person with the biggest or prettiest ring.)

End of history and meaning

According to Baudrillard, in the 20th century, we somehow reached the termination of history. To understand this, it is important to realise that Baudrillard maintains a self-conscious, Postmodernist approach that is based on construing reality as really a morass of fictitious images, and illusions that have no meaning.

An example to be used is his elaboration on the loss of meaning. Baudrillard remarks: 'the universe is not dialectical: it moves toward the extremes, and not towards equilibrium; it is devoted to a radical antagonisms and not to reconciliation or to synthesis'. To adumbrate, in today's society, there is excessive production, where there is increasing technology enabling faster circulation of the production and distribution. Baudrillard however postulates that we have passed beyond production itself, and have came through the previously-held distinctions of production. He argues that the constancy and perpetuity of production has become so ordinary, that the ideal disappears, and no semanticity or meaning is left, and the method has become commonplace. This is related to Marshall McLuhan's credo – 'The medium is the message'. This approach has been criticized for confusing meaning per se, with a mere shock effect. Some theorists argue that by being more exposed to a process of production, we may actually attach different types of meaning to an object, albeit anthropically biased, in terms of its functions for humans.

Critiques of Baudrillard

Baudrillard was criticized by many scholars. Douglas Kellner offers a critique of Baudrillard in 'Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond' (ISBN 0804717575) that attempts to defend traditional Marxism from Baudrillard's critique. And Christopher Norris attacked what he saw as Baudrillard's lack of meaningful political engagement in 'Uncritical Theory : Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War' (ISBN 0870238175).

Bibliography

Simulacra and Simulation
Seduction
Forget Foucault
Fragments
Passwords
The Illusion of the End
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place
America
The Spirit of Terrorism
Simulations
The System of Objects
The Ecstasy of Communication
Impossible Exchange
The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures
In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities
The Singular Objects of Architecture
The Perfect Crime

External links