Jean Baudrillard

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Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy
Jean Baudrillard
Name:	Jean Baudrillard
Birth:	July 29, 1929 in Reims
Death:	March 6, 2007 in Paris
School/tradition:	Postmodernism
Main interests:	Postmodernism, post-structuralism
Notable ideas:	Hyperreality
Influences:	Andy Warhol, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Marshall McLuhan
Influenced:	Wachowski brothers, The Matrix

Jean Baudrillard (July 29, 1929 – March 6, 2007) (IPA pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ bo.dʀi.jaʀ]^[1]) was a French cultural theorist, philosopher, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism.

1 Life
2 Introduction to his work
3 The object value system
4 Simulacra and Simulation
5 The end of history and meaning
6 On the Gulf War
7 On the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks
8 Critiques of Baudrillard
9 Representations of and references to Baudrillard
10 Bibliography
- 10.1 Books
- 10.2 Audio-CDs
11 References
12 External links

[edit] Life

Jean Baudrillard was born to a peasant family in Reims, France, on July 29, 1929^[2]. He studied German language at the Sorbonne University in Paris and taught German in a lycée (1958-1966). He had worked as a translator and critic and continued studying philosophy and sociology. In 1966 he completed his doctoral thesis "Thèse de troisième cycle: Le Système des objets" (Thesis of the Third Cycle: The System of Objects) under the tutelage of Henri Lefebvre. From 1966 to 1972 he worked as Maître Assistant (Assistant Professor) and Maître de Conférences en Sociologie (Professor). In 1972 he finished his habilitation 'L'Autre par lui-même' (The Other, by oneself) and taught Sociology as a professor at the Université de Paris-X Nanterre.

From 1986 to 1990 Baudrillard was Directeur Scientifique (Scientific Director) at IRIS (Institut de Recherche et d'Information Socio-Économique) at the Université de Paris-IX Dauphine. He continued supporting the Institut de Recherche sur l'Innovation Sociale at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and was Satrap at the Collège de 'Pataphysique until his death. Baudrillard also collaborated at the Canadian philosophical review Ctheory, where he was abundantly cited. He died of illness on March 6, 2007 at the age of seventy-seven.

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[edit] Introduction to his work

Jean Baudrillard was a social theorist best known for his analyses of modes of mediation and of technological communication; the scope of his writing covers diverse subjects —from consumerism to gender relations to the social understanding of history to journalistic commentaries about AIDS, cloning, the Rushdie affair, the (first) Gulf War and the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, USA.

He had affinities with post-structuralism; his arguments consistently drew upon the notion that systems of signification and meaning are understandable only in terms of their interrelation. In contrast to Foucault, however, of whom he was sharply critical, Baudrillard developed theories based not on power and knowledge but on the notions of seduction, simulation, and hyperreality, (the word most associated with his philosophy). These notions share the common principle that signification, and therefore meaning, is self-referential (i.e. construed upon absence, following structuralist semiotics— so, 'dog' means 'dog' not because of what the word says so, but because of what it does not say: 'cat', 'goat', 'tree' et cetera). This principle argues that in contemporary global society, wherein technological communication has created an excessive proliferation of meaning, the self-referentiality of meaning has prompted, not a McLuhan-style global village, but a world where meaning has been effaced, reducing society to an opaque mass, where the real has been reduced to self-referential signs of its existence.

In this postulate, the erosion of meaning via its excess, Baudrillard —against Foucault, Kantian rationalism, and liberal humanism— sought to understand the world neither in terms of the subject's desire to coherently know the world, nor in terms of the interpolation of power within subjectivity (in the manner of Foucault), but in terms of the object, and its power to seduce (its power to stand for, or to simulate). In result Baudrillard had, particularly in his later work, 'withdrawn' himself, in a sense, from his own writing, by employing poetic and ironic language in his books. His political stance led him —drawing upon the anthropological work of Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille— to oppose semiotic logic —meaning, sign, signification, and commodity exchange— with that of the symbolic realm —gift exchange, potlatch (the practice of sumptuous destruction), and analyses of the principle of Evil (and the meaning of invoking said principle). This prompted him to characterize the world in terms of the binary opposition of symbolic cultures (based upon gift exchange) and the expanding 'globalized' world (based upon sign and commodity exchange), a world which has no answer to symbolic logic. Hence, In his last years, Baudrillard portentously was of the opinion that the expansion of liberal, parliamentary capitalism and its financial commodification unwittingly sows the seeds of reaction against it, by its failure to understand the symbolic side of social existence —indeed, he (controversially) argued that susch is how to best understand the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the economy of the United States and its military establishment. (see below).

[edit] The object value system

Baudrillard's early work, in the books The System of Objects, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, and The Consumer Society, focused upon the application of structural semiotics to the thought of Karl Marx. Baudrillard argued, drawing from Roland Barthes and Georges Bataille, that, while Marxist economics and the classical economics of Adam Smith had sought to understand the consumer society in opposing ways, both unquestioningly accepted the nature of use value. Therefore, they both misunderstood need in the same way: always as a genuine, asocially-constituted drive for a given person's consumer satisfaction. Against that, Baudrillard argued that a person in buying and consuming goods and services necessarily places himself, herself within a system of signs; objects always 'say something' about their users; he developed a theory of society governed with a system of sumptuous, sacrificial consumption, in which needs become 'ideologically generated'^[3]. Described as four processes for obtaining value:

The functional value of an object, i.e. its instrumental purpose. (A pen writes; a refridgerator cools.) Marx's 'use-value' of an object as a commodity.
The exchange value of an object, i.e. its economic value. (One pen is worth three pencils; one refridgerator is worth the salary earned for three months of work.)
The symbolic value of an object, i.e. its arbitrarily-assigned and -agreed value in relation to another subject. (A pen symbolizes a student's school graduation gift or a commencement speaker's gift; a diamond as symbolic of publicly declared marital love.)
The sign value of an object, its value within a system of objects. (A pen is part of a desk set, or a particular brand, type, or style of pen confers social status; a diamond ring's sign value is in relation to other diamond rings, or the absence of a diamond ring. The person is interpolated, perhaps eroded, in the seductive play of objects.)

Later, Baudrillard rejected Marxism (The Mirror of Production and Symbolic Exchange and Death), but the opposition of semiotic functional logic to symbolic realm logic continued in his work until his death in 2007.

[edit] Simulacra and Simulation

Main article: Simulacra and Simulation

As he developed his work throughout the 1980s, he moved from economically-based theory to the consideration of mediation and mass communications. Although retaining his interest in Saussurean semiotics and the logic of symbolic exchange (as influenced by anthropologist Marcel Mauss) Baudrillard turned his attention to Marshall McLuhan, developing ideas about how the nature of social relations is determined by the forms of communication that a society employs. In so doing, Baudrillard progressed beyond both Saussure's and Roland Barthes's formal semiology to consider the implications of an historically-understood (and thus formless), version of structural semiology.

Most famously, he argued —in Symbolic Exchange and Death— that Western societies have undergone a "precession of simulacra".^[4] This precession is in the form of "orders of simulacra", from:

the era of the original
to the counterfeit
to the produced, mechanical copy, and through
to the simulated "third order of simulacra", whereby the copy has replaced the original.

Referring to "On Exactitude in Science", a fable written by Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, he argued that just as for contemporary society the simulated copy had superseded the original object, so, too, the map had come to precede the geographic territory (c.f. map and territory relation), e.g. the first Gulf War (see below): the image of war preceded real war.

With such reasoning, he characterised the present age —following Ludwig Feuerbach and Guy Debord— as one of 'hyperreality' where the real object has been effaced or superseded, by the signs of its existence. Such an assertion —the one for which he is most criticised— is typical of his "fatal strategy" of attempting to push his theories of society beyond themselves. Rather than saying, that our hysteria surrounding pedophilia is such that we no longer really understand what childhood is anymore, Baudrillard argued that "the Child no longer exists".^[5] Similarly, rather than arguing —as did Susan Sontag in her book On Photography— that the notion of reality has been complicated by the profusion of images of it, Baudrillard asserted: "the real no longer exists". In so saying, he characterised his philosophical challenge as no longer being the Leibnizian question of: "Why is there something, rather than nothing?", but, instead: "Why is there nothing, rather than something?"^[6]

The science fiction film The Matrix makes many connections to Simulacra and Simulation. Its protagonist, Neo, has a copy of Simulacra and Simulation in the beginning of the story. Neo uses the hollowed book as a hiding place for money and his important computer files, however, the hollowed copy Neo has in The Matrix has the chapter "On Nihilism" in the middle, and not at the end where it is really located. The Morpheus character refers to the real world, outside of the Matrix, as the "desert of the real", a reference to Baudrillard's work. In the film's original script, Morpheus specifically refered to Baudrillard's book, however, in an interview, Baudrillard said "The Matrix" has nothing to do with his work. [3]

[edit] The end of history and meaning

Baudrillard's most in-depth writings on the notion of historicity are found in the books Fatal Strategies and The Illusion of the End. It is for these writings that he received a full-chapter denunciation from the physicist Alan Sokal (along with Jean Bricmont), due to his alleged misuse of physical concepts of linear time, space and stability. His argument can be summarised as being an attempted subversion of the thesis of Francis Fukuyama that the collapse of Soviet Communism brought humanity to the 'end of History' whereby the world's global dialectical machinations had been resolved with the triumph of liberal capitalism. In contrast to this, Baudrillard maintained that the 'end of History', in terms of a teleological goal, had always been an illusion brought about by modernity's will towards progress, civilization and rational unification. And this was an illusion that to all intents and purposes vanished toward the end of the 20th century, brought about by the 'speed' at which society moved, effectively 'destabilising' the linear progression of History (it is these comments, specifically, that provoked Sokal's criticism). History was, so to speak, outpaced by its own spectacular realisation. As Baudrillard himself caustically put it:

The end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history. There are no longer any dustbins for disposing of old ideologies, old regimes, old values. Where are we going to throw Marxism, which actually invented the dustbins of history? (Yet there is some justice here since the very people who invented them have fallen in.) Conclusion: if there are no more dustbins of history, this is because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin, just as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin.^[7]

This approach to history is what marks out Baudrillard's affinities with the postmodern philosophy of Jean-Francois Lyotard: the idea that society — and Western society in particular — has 'dropped out' of the grand narratives of History (for example the coming of Communism or the triumph of civilized modern society). But Baudrillard supplemented this argument by contending that, although this 'dropping out' may have taken place, the global world (which in Baudrillard's writing is sharply distinct from a universal humanity) is, in accordance with its spectacular understanding of itself, condemned to 'play out' this illusory ending in a hyper-teleological way — acting out the end of the end of the end, ad infinitum. Thus Baudrillard argues that — in a manner similar to Giorgio Agamben's book Means without Ends — Western society is subject to the political restriction of means that are justified by ends that do not exist.

[edit] On the Gulf War

Much of Baudrillard's notoriety, as both an academic and a political commentator, comes from his deliberately provocative claim, in 1991, that the first Gulf War 'did not take place'. His argument (greatly criticised by Chris Norris [see below], who perceived denial of empirical events), described the Gulf War as the inverse of the Clausewitzian formula: it was not 'the continuation of politics by other means', but 'the continuation of the absence of politics by other means'. Accordingly, Saddam Hussein was not fighting the Allied Forces, but using the lives of his soldiers as a form of sacrifice to preserve his power (p. 72, 2004 edition). The Allied Forces fighting the Iraqi military forces were merely dropping 10,000 tonnes of bombs daily, as if proving to themselves that there was an enemy to fight (p. 61). So, too, were the Western media complicit, presenting the war in real time, by recycling images of war to propagate the notion that the two enemies, the US (and allies) were actually fighting the Iraqi Army, but, such was not the case: Saddam Hussein did not use his military capacity (the Iraqi Air Force), his politico-military power was not weakened (he suppressed the Kurdish insurgency against Iraq at war's end), so, concluding that politically little had changed in Iraq: the enemy went undefeated, the victors were not victorious, ergo, there was no war: the Gulf War did not occur.

Much of the repute that Baudrillard found as a result of the book (originally an article form in the British newspaper The Guardian and the French newspaper Libération) was based upon the critique that the Gulf War was not ineffectual, as Baudrillard portrayed it: people died, the political map was altered, and Saddam Hussein's regime was harmed. Some critics (Norris included) accuse Baudrillard of instant revisionism; a denial of the physical occurrence of the conflict (part of his denial of reality, in general). Consequently, Baudrillard was accused of lazy amoralism, encompassing cynical scepticism, and Berkelian idealism. Sympathetic commentators (such as William Merrin, in his book Baudrillard and the Media) have argued that Baudrillard was more concerned with the West's technological and political dominance and the globalization of its commercial interests, and what it means for the present possibility of war. Merrin has averred that Baudrillard did not deny that something occurred, but merely denied that that something was a war; rather it was 'an atrocity masquerading as a war'. Merrin's book viewed the accusations of amorality as redundant and based upon misreading; Baudrillard's own position was more nuanced. To put it in Baudrillard's own words (p. 71-72):

Saddam liquidates the communists, Moscow flirts even more with him; he gases the Kurds, it is not held against him; he eliminates the religious cadres, the whole of Islam makes peace with him.... Even ... the 100,000 dead will only have been the final decoy that Saddam will have sacrificed, the blood money paid in forfeit according to a calculated equivalence, in order to conserve his power. What is worse is that these dead still serve as an alibi for those who do not want to have been excited for nothing: at least these dead will prove this war was indeed a war and not a shameful and pointless hoax....

[edit] On the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks

In contrast to the 'non-event' of the Gulf War, in the essay The Spirit of Terrorism he characterised the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City as the 'absolute event.' Seeking to understand them as an (ab)reaction to the technological and political expansion of capitalist globalization, rather than as a war of religiously-based or civilization-based warfare. He termed the absolute event, and its consequences, as follows (p. 11 in the 2002 version):

This is not a clash of civilisations or religions, and it reaches far beyond Islam and America, on which efforts are being made to focus the conflict in order to create the delusion of a visible confrontation and a solution based upon force. There is indeed a fundamental antagonism here, but one that points past the spectre of America (which is perhaps the epicentre, but in no sense the sole embodiment, of globalisation) and the spectre of Islam (which is not the embodiment of terrorism either) to triumphant globalisation battling against itself.

Baudrillard thus placed the attacks —as befits his theory of society— in context as a symbolic reaction to the continued expansion of a world based solely upon commodity exchange. Said approach led to being criticised on two counts. First, Richard Wolin (in The Seduction of Unreason) forcefully accused Baudrillard and Slavoj Zizek, of all but celebrating the terrorist attacks, essentially claiming that the United States of America received what it deserved. Zizek, however, countered that accusation, in the journal Critical Inquiry, to Wolin's analysis as a form of intellectual barbarism, saying that Wolin fails to see the difference, between fantasising about an event and deserving that event. Merrin (in Baudrillard and the Media) argued that Baudrillard's position affords the terrorists a certain position —indeed Merrin, in the journal Economy and Society, noted the weakness of Baudrillard's argument being that he gives the symbolic facets of society unfair privilege above semiotic concerns. Second, the criticism of Baudrillard's position on September 11, by Bruno Latour, in Critical Inquiry: Baudrillard's September 11 Attack was ineluctable, because he (Baudrillard) conceived only of society in terms of a symbolic and semiotic dualism, alluding the Towers being 'brought down by their own weight' —their destruction forced by the society that created them.

[edit] Critiques of Baudrillard

Baudrillard's writing, and his uncompromising positions, has lead to his being criticised with an almost unprecedented ferocity (possibly only Jacques Lacan has been the subject of so many hostile critiques). Only one of the two major confrontational books on Baudrillard's thought — Christopher Norris's Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War (ISBN 0-87023-817-5) — however seeks to reject his media theory and position on 'the real' out of hand. The other — Douglas Kellner's Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (ISBN 0-8047-1757-5) — seeks rather to analyse Baudrillard's relation to postmodernism (a concept with which Baudrillard has had a continued, if uneasy and rarely explicit relationship) and to present a Marxist counter. Regarding the former, William Merrin (as discussed above) has published more than one denunciation of Norris's position. The latter Baudrillard himself characterised as reductive (in Nicholas Zurbrugg's Jean Baudrillard: Art and Artefact).

Willam Merrin's work has presented a more sympathetic critique, which attempts to 'place Baudrillard in opposition to himself.' Thereby Merrin has argued that Baudrillard's position on semiotic analysis of meaning denies himself his own position on symbolic exchange. Merrin thus alludes to the common criticism of post-structuralist work (a criticism not dissimilar in either Baudrillard, Foucault or Deleuze) that emphasising interrelation as the basis for subjectivity denies the human agency from which social structures necessarily arise. (Alain Badiou and Michel de Certeau have made this point generally, and Barry Sandywell has argued as much in Baudrillard's specific case).

Finally Mark Poster, Baudrillard's main editor and one of a number of present day academics who argue for his contemporary relevance, has remarked (p. 8 of Poster's 2nd ed. of Selected Writings):

Baudrillard's writing up to the mid-1980s is open to several criticisms. He fails to define key terms, such as the code; his writing style is hyperbolic and declarative, often lacking sustained, systematic analysis when it is appropriate; he totalizes his insights, refusing to qualify or delimit his claims. He writes about particular experiences, television images, as if nothing else in society mattered, extrapolating a bleak view of the world from that limited base. He ignores contradictory evidence such as the many benefits afforded by the new media....

Nonetheless Poster is keen to refute the most extreme of Baudrillard's critics, the likes of Alan Sokal and Norris who see him as a purveyor of a form of reality-denying irrationalism (ibid p. 7):

Baudrillard is not disputing the trivial issue that reason remains operative in some actions, that if I want to arrive at the next block, for example, I can assume a Newtonian universe (common sense), plan a course of action (to walk straight for X meters, carry out the action, and finally fulfil my goal by arriving at the point in question). What is in doubt is that this sort of thinking enables a historically informed grasp of the present in general. According to Baudrillard, it does not. The concurrent spread of the hyperreal through the media and the collapse of liberal and Marxist politics as the master narratives, deprives the rational subject of its privileged access to truth. In an important sense individuals are no longer citizens, eager to maximise their civil rights, nor proletarians, anticipating the onset of communism. They are rather consumers, and hence the prey of objects as defined by the code.

Dennis Dutton, founder of Philosophy & Literature's "Bad Writing Contest" - which listed examples of the kind of willfully obscurantist prose for which Baudrillard was frequently criticised - had the following to say:

Some writers in their manner and stance intentionally provoke challenge and criticism from their readers. Others just invite you to think. Baudrillard’s hyperprose demands only that you grunt wide-eyed or bewildered assent. He yearns to have intellectual influence, but must fend off any serious analysis of his own writing, remaining free to leap from one bombastic assertion to the next, no matter how brazen. Your place is simply to buy his books, adopt his jargon, and drop his name wherever possible.^[8]

[edit] Representations of and references to Baudrillard

Native American (Anishinaabe) writer Gerald Vizenor, who has made extensive use of Baudrillard's concepts of simulation in his critical work,^[9] features Baudrillard as a character in a "debwe heart dance" in his 1996 novel Hotline Healers^[10]
The Matrix, a (1999) film by the Wachowski brothers, owes an extensive debt to Baudrillard's thought. One critic went so far as to claim that if "Baudrillard... has not yet embraced the film it may be because he is thinking of suing for a screen credit. ^[11]

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Books

The System of Objects (1968)
The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (1970)
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972)
The Mirror of Production (1973)
Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976)
Forget Foucault (1977)
Seduction (1979)
Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1982)
Fatal Strategies (1983)
America (1986)
Cool Memories (1987)
The Ecstasy of Communication (1987)
The Transparency of Evil (1990)
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991)
The Illusion of the End (1992)
Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews (Edited by Mike Gane) (1993)
The Perfect Crime (1995)
Paroxysm: Interviews with Philippe Petit (1998)
Impossible Exchange (1999)
Passwords (2000)
The Singular Objects of Architecture (2000)
The Vital Illusion (2000)
Au royaume des aveugles (2002)
The Spirit of Terrorism: And Requiem for the Twin Towers (2002)
Fragments (interviews with François L'Yvonnet) (2003)
The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact (2005)
The Conspiracy of Art (2005)
Les exilés du dialogue, Jean Baudrillard and Enrique Valiente Noailles (2005)
Utopia Deferred: Writings for Utopie (1967-1978) (2006)

[edit] Audio-CDs

Die Illusion des Endes - Das Ende der Illusion (Jean Baudrillard & Boris Groys), 58 minutes + booklet. Cologne: supposé 1997. ISBN 3-932513-01-0
Die Macht der Verführung, 55 minutes. Cologne: supposé 2006. ISBN 978-3-932513-67-1

[edit] References

^ See How to pronounce Jean Baudrillard.
^ Guardian Obituary
^ p. 63 in For a Critique...., 1983 version
^ the simulacrum being that "truth which hides the fact there is none" —a term roughly comparable to the word idol, as in hevel (vapor, idol, vanity, or absurdity, per biblical scholar Michael V. Fox) in the Biblical Ecclesiastes
^ In the essay 'The Dark Continent of Childhood' in the essay collection Screened Out, 2002.
^ In The Perfect Crime.
^ The Illusion of the End, or Selected Writings, p. 263.
^ Dutton, Dennis, "Jean Baudrillard", Philosophy and Literature 14 (1990) 234-38.
^ Review of Postindian Conversations by Gerald Vizenor and A. Robert Lee [1]
^ Gerald Vizenor, Hotline Healers (1996), Chapter 5.
^ Adam Gopnik, "The Unreal Thing", New Yorker 19 May 2003 [2]

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