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.

Contents

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 best known for his formulation of the notion of hyperreality, and in particular hyperreality in the United States. 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 Furthermore, authenticity has been replaced by copy (thus reality is replaced by a substitute), and nothing is "real," though those engaged in the illusion are incapable of seeing it.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.

While early in his career he was influenced by Marxism, he eventually came to the conclusion that Marx's attitudes were in mirror opposition to that of capitalist thought, and that Marx in fact held the same basic worldview as the capitalist. For instance, he did not question such concepts as "work" or "value". In short, while perhaps well-intentioned, he argued that Marx was infected by the "virus of bourgeois thought". In opposition, he proposed a concept of symbolic exchange, a "cycle of gifts and countergifts", similar to a gift economy. However, in time he began to prefer the idea of a system based around seduction, involving "the charms of pure and mere games, superificial rituals". While he gives such possible alternatives, he sees little hope in any repair of the social world, but rather a further progression into a hyperreal system offering little distinction between what is real and what is not. He sees the United States as having moved furthest in this direction, noting for instance that his decision to visit the United States stemmed from his desire to seek "the finished form of the future catastrophe."

On the Gulf War

Shortly before the Gulf War, Baudrillard predicted that the war would not actually happen. After the war, he claimed that he had been correct, 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. 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 was 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. One could imagine, with relation to this claim, that the American soldier often fought solely within the system of military technology, to the degree that the war's "culture imprint" remains that of friendly fire created by faulty machinery, and a lack of actual face-to-face combat. The video screen-mediated concept of the precision strike became an advertisement for American technological dominance, which makes it possible to view the war as, in part, an advertisement for military hardware.

The problem is that actual deaths were involved, deaths which were as much de-realised by the rhetoric of the clinical, technological war as Baudrillard's abstruse analysis of the war as a simulacrum. The ongoing indecision and subterfuge involving Gulf War Syndrome recalls again the precession of the real event, that of suffering caused by war, by debate over what constitutes the real, and the assertion of an authorised history which masks, and replaces in public consciousness, the effects of the real.

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:

  1. 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.
  2. The exchange value of an object is its economic value. (A pen is worth three pencils. A diamond ring is worth three months' salary.)
  3. 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.)
  4. 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. The method of this termination comes through the lack of oppositional elements in society, with the mass having become 'the silent majority', an imploded concept which absorbs images passively, becoming itself a media overwritten by those who speak for it. By its silence, contends Baudrillard, the people create the extreme situation which is exploited by the aestheticising of politics and the symbolically viral kind of conflict that is terrorism. The end of history is typified by the public assumption of revolutionary fulfillment, which is equal to the same, the celebration of the past in the place of concern for the future and the continual repetition of scenarios in identical forms. For Baudrillard this is the natural result of an ethic of unity in which actually agonistic opposites are taken to be essentially the same. For example, Baudrillard contends that universalism (human rights, equality) is equated with globalisation, which is not concerned with immutable values but with mediums of exchange and equalisation such as the global market and mass media.

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 antagonism and not to reconciliation or to synthesis'. For example, in today's society, there is excessive production, where there is increasing technology enabling faster circulation of production and distribution. Baudrillard however postulates that we have passed beyond production itself and have come through the previously-held distinctions of production. He argues that the constancy and perpetuity of production has become so ordinary, that the ideal disappears, that no semanticity or meaning is left, and that 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 anthropocentrically, in terms of its functions for humans.

Critiques of Baudrillard

Baudrillard has been 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).

Some counter that these critiques of Baudrillard are based on a limited understanding of his work. While Baudrillard is deeply critical of Marxism for its failure to engage in a deconstruction of capitalism beyond the 'use-value-exchange-value' dichotomy (and thus failing to account for the unproductive expenditure of luxury goods, expendable purchases, etc., which have defined late-capitalism since the mid-twentieth century), he himself has rarely used the term 'postmodern'. When he does, it is to describe in disparaging terms the decadence of Western culture, or more specifically, "the exalting of residues, rehabilitation by bricolage, eclectic sentimentality ... high dilution, low intensities" (The Illusion of the End, 1994: 35).

Bibliography

Unless stated otherwise, publication dates given are those of the original French language editions, and not those of their English translations or subsequent revised editions.

Books

Essays

Quotations

  • "Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization."
  • "Marxism is therefore only a limited petit bourgeois critique, one more step in the banalization of life toward the ‘good use’ of the social!"
  • "One day, we shall stand up and our backsides will remain attached to our seats."
  • "For nothing can be greater than seduction itself, not even the order that destroys it."
  • Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland.... Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. -- Simulacra and Simulation p. 12-13

External links

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