art.wikisort.org - Researcher

Jean Baudrillard (UK: /ˈboʊdrɪjɑːr/ BOHD-rih-yar,[25] US: /ˌboʊdriˈɑːr/ BOHD-ree-AR, French: [ʒɑ̃ bodʁijaʁ]; 27 July 1929 – 6 March 2007) was a French sociologist, philosopher and cultural theorist. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as simulation and hyperreality. Baudrillard wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, gender relations, critique of economy, economics, social history, art, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his best known works are Seduction (1978), Simulacra and Simulation (1981), America (1986), and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991). His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism.[26][27][28][29] Nevertheless, Baudrillard can be also seen as an opponent of post-structuralism[30][31][32][33] and had distanced himself from postmodernism.[34][27][26][35]

Jean Baudrillard
Baudrillard in 2004 at the European Graduate School
Born	(1929-07-27)27 July 1929 Reims, France
Died	6 March 2007(2007-03-06) (aged 77) Paris, France
Alma mater	University of Paris
Era	20th-/21st-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Continental philosophy French Nietzscheanism Post-Marxism[1] Nihilism Pataphysics Post-structuralism (debated) Postmodernism (disavowed)
Institutions	Paris X Nanterre European Graduate School
Doctoral advisor	Henri Lefebvre
Main interests	the event alterity the object Pataphysics photography semiotics power historicity(end of history) System theory[citation needed] (singularity[citation needed] Social entropy[citation needed]) Mass media and Media theory communication and communication theory[citation needed] simulacrum postmodernity consumerism gender relations critique of economy(value-form) economics social history art Western foreign policy popular culture anthropology 'seduction'/love [a] (see also Mario Perniola#Post-structuralism) Philosophy of death[2][3]
Notable ideas	the transfinite the transpolitical[4] transaesthetics Hyperreality sign value desert of the real 'symbolic exchange' 'theory-fiction' (See also Nick Land) 'raw phenomenology'[5]
Influences Karl Marx • Marcel Mauss • Marshall McLuhan • Alfred Jarry • Ferdinand de Saussure • Roland Barthes • Michel Foucault • Guy Debord • Henri Lefebvre • Georges Bataille • Antonin Artaud[4] • Friedrich Nietzsche • Soren Kierkegaard[6][7] • Jorge Luis Borges • Thorstein Veblen[8][9]  • Claude Levi-Strauss[10]  • Charles Baudelaire[11]  • Walter Benjamin[11]  • Elias Canetti[12][13][14][15][16][17]  • Roger Caillois[18][19][20]
Influenced Jacques Ellul[citation needed] • Sophie Calle • Peter Halley • Gerald Vizenor • The Wachowskis • Cody Wilson[21] • Gilles Lipovetsky • Slavoj Žižek •  • Nick Land • Mario Perniola  • Byung-Chul Han  • Paul Virilio[citation needed] • Adam Possamai[22][additional citation(s) needed] • Arthur Kroker[23] • Sylvère Lotringer[24]

Life

Baudrillard was born in Reims, northeastern France, on 27 July 1929. His grandparents were farm workers and his father a gendarme. During high school (at the Lycée at Reims), he became aware of pataphysics via philosophy professor Emmanuel Peillet, which is said to be crucial for understanding Baudrillard's later thought.[36] He became the first of his family to attend university when he moved to Paris to attend the Sorbonne.[37] There he studied German language and literature,[38] which led him to begin teaching the subject at several different lycées, both Parisian and provincial, from 1960 until 1966.[36] While teaching, Baudrillard began to publish reviews of literature and translated the works of such authors as Peter Weiss, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann.[39]

While teaching German, Baudrillard began to transfer to sociology, eventually completing and publishing in 1968 his doctoral thesis Le Système des Objets (The System of Objects) under the dissertation committee of Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Bourdieu. Subsequently, he began teaching Sociology at the Paris X Nanterre, a university campus just outside Paris which would become heavily involved in the events of May 1968.[40] During this time, Baudrillard worked closely with Philosopher Humphrey De Battenburge, who described Baudrillard as a "visionary".[41] At Nanterre he took up a position as Maître Assistant (Assistant Professor), then Maître de Conférences (Associate Professor), eventually becoming a professor after completing his accreditation, L'Autre par lui-même (The Other by Himself).

In 1970, Baudrillard made the first of his many trips to the United States (Aspen, Colorado), and in 1973, the first of several trips to Kyoto, Japan. He was given his first camera in 1981 in Japan, which led to him becoming a photographer.[39]

In 1986 he moved to IRIS (Institut de Recherche et d'Information Socio-Économique) at the Université de Paris-IX Dauphine, where he spent the latter part of his teaching career. During this time he had begun to move away from sociology as a discipline (particularly in its "classical" form), and, after ceasing to teach full-time, he rarely identified himself with any particular discipline, although he remained linked to academia. During the 1980s and 1990s his books had gained a wide audience, and in his last years he became, to an extent, an intellectual celebrity,[42] being published often in the French- and English-speaking popular press. He nonetheless 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. Baudrillard taught at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland,[43] and collaborated at the Canadian theory, culture, and technology review Ctheory, where he was abundantly cited. He also participated in the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies from its inception in 2004 until his death.[44] In 1999–2000, his photographs were exhibited at the Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris.[45] In 2004, Baudrillard attended the major conference on his work, "Baudrillard and the Arts", at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in Karlsruhe, Germany.[39]

Personal life

Baudrillard enjoyed baroque music; a favorite composer was Claudio Monteverdi. He also favored rock music such as The Velvet Underground & Nico.[46]

Baudrillard did his writing using "his old typewriter, never at the computer".[46][35] He has stated that a computer is "true prosthesis" and not "merely a handier and more complex kind of typewriter" and[47]

Baudrillard was married twice. He and his first wife Lucile Baudrillard had two children, Gilles and Anne.[48][49][50]^{[circular reference]}

In 1970 during his first marriage, Baudrillard met 25 year old Marine Dupuis when she arrived at the Paris Nanterre University where he was a professor. Marine went on to be a media artistic director. They married in 1994 when he was 65.[51][46]

Diagnosed with cancer in 2005, Baudrillard battled the disease for two years from his apartment on Rue Sainte-Beuve, Paris, dying at the age of 77.[48][46] Marine Baudrillard curates Cool Memories, an association of Jean Baudrillard's friends.

Key concepts

Baudrillard's published work emerged as part of a generation of French thinkers including: Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan who all shared an interest in semiotics, and he is often seen as a part of the post-structuralist philosophical school.[52] In common with many post-structuralists, his arguments consistently draw upon the notion that signification and meaning are both only understandable in terms of how particular words or "signs" interrelate. Baudrillard thought, as do many post-structuralists, that meaning is brought about through systems of signs working together. Following on from the structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Baudrillard argued that meaning (value) is created through difference—through what something is not (so "dog" means "dog" because it is not-"cat", not-"goat", not-"tree", etc.). In fact, he viewed meaning as near enough self-referential: objects, images of objects, words and signs are situated in a web of meaning; one object's meaning is only understandable through its relation to the meaning of other objects; for instance, one thing's prestige relates to another's mundanity.

From this starting point Baudrillard theorized broadly about human society based upon this kind of self-referentiality. His writing portrays societies always searching for a sense of meaning—or a "total" understanding of the world—that remains consistently elusive. In contrast to Post-structuralism (such as Michel Foucault), for whom the formations of knowledge emerge only as the result of relations of power, Baudrillard developed theories in which the excessive, fruitless search for total knowledge leads almost inevitably to a kind of delusion. In Baudrillard's view, the (human) subject may try to understand the (non-human) object, but because the object can only be understood according to what it signifies (and because the process of signification immediately involves a web of other signs from which it is distinguished) this never produces the desired results. The subject is, rather, seduced (in the original Latin sense: seducere, 'to lead away') by the object. He argued therefore that, in the final analysis, a complete understanding of the minutiae of human life is impossible, and when people are seduced into thinking otherwise they become drawn toward a "simulated" version of reality, or, to use one of his neologisms, a state of "hyperreality." This is not to say that the world becomes unreal, but rather that the faster and more comprehensively societies begin to bring reality together into one supposedly coherent picture, the more insecure and unstable it looks and the more fearful societies become.[53] Reality, in this sense, "dies out."[54]

Accordingly, Baudrillard argued that the excess of signs and of meaning in late 20th century "global" society had caused (quite paradoxically) an effacement of reality. In this world neither liberal nor Marxist utopias are any longer believed in. We live, he argued, not in a "global village", to use Marshall McLuhan's phrase, but rather in a world that is ever more easily petrified by even the smallest event. Because the "global" world operates at the level of the exchange of signs and commodities, it becomes ever more blind to symbolic acts such as, for example, terrorism. In Baudrillard's work the symbolic realm (which he develops a perspective on through the anthropological work of Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille) is seen as quite distinct from that of signs and signification. Signs can be exchanged like commodities; symbols, on the other hand, operate quite differently: they are exchanged, like gifts, sometimes violently as a form of potlatch. Baudrillard, particularly in his later work, saw the "global" society as without this "symbolic" element, and therefore symbolically (if not militarily) defenseless against acts such as the Rushdie Fatwa[55] or, indeed, the September 11 terrorist attacks against the United States and its military and economic establishment.

The object value system

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Notable works Walden The Theory of the Leisure Class Brave New World The Affluent Society One-Dimensional Man The Society of the Spectacle (book · film) The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures [fr] Steal This Book Small Is Beautiful To Have or to Be? Future Primitive and Other Essays Fight Club (novel · film) Escape from Affluenza No Logo Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order The Cultural Creatives Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic Evasion The Corporation Surplus: Terrorized into Being Consumers So, What's Your Price? What Would Jesus Buy?
Organizations and groups Adbusters Crass CrimethInc. Deep Green Resistance Democracy Now! Earth Liberation Front Fifth Estate Freecycle Green Anarchy Institute for Social Ecology Monthly Review Rage Against the Machine Reverend Billy The Venus Project The Yes Men 350.org
People Jean Baudrillard Mauro Bonaiuti Noam Chomsky Erich Fromm Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen Edward Goldsmith Paul Goodman André Gorz Ivan Illich Serge Latouche Donella Meadows Pierre Rabhi John Ruskin E. F. Schumacher Bernard Stiegler Henry David Thoreau
Related social movements Alter-globalization Amateurism Anarcho-communism Anarcho-primitivism Anarcho-punk Anti-capitalism Anti-corporate activism Anti-globalization movement Communism Diggers (theater) Ecofeminism Eco-socialism Environmentalism Feminism Food Not Bombs Green anarchism Green left Green politics Hippie Libertarian socialism Neo-Luddism New Left Occupy Wall Street Postmodernism Punk Situationists Slow movement Social anarchism Social ecology
See also Works about consumerism Advanced capitalism Advertising Barter Capitalism Consumer behaviour Consumption (economics) Consumption (sociology) Cooperative Counterculture Cultural hegemony Ecological economics Economic materialism Economic problems Frugality Green economy Gross National Happiness Heterodox economics HosPex Influence of mass media Informal sector Intentional community Left-wing politics McDonaldization Mutual aid Natural resource economics Non-monetary economy Permaculture Post-materialism Productivism Shopping Social movements Subsistence economy Sustainability Sweatshops Veblen good Workaholic
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In his early books, such as The System of Objects, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, and The Consumer Society [fr], Baudrillard's main focus is upon consumerism, and how different objects are consumed in different ways. At this time Baudrillard's political outlook was loosely associated with Marxism (and Situationism), but in these books he differed from Karl Marx in one significant way. For Baudrillard, as for the situationists, it was consumption rather than production that was the main driver of capitalist society.

Baudrillard came to this conclusion by criticising Marx's concept of "use-value." Baudrillard thought that both Marx's and Adam Smith's economic thought accepted the idea of genuine needs relating to genuine uses too easily and too simply. Baudrillard argued, drawing from Georges Bataille, that needs are constructed, rather than innate. He stressed that all purchases, because they always signify something socially, have their fetishistic side. Objects always, drawing from Roland Barthes, "say something" about their users. And this was, for him, why consumption was and remains more important than production: because the "ideological genesis of needs" precedes the production of goods to meet those needs.[56]^: 63

He wrote that there are four ways of an object obtaining value. The four value-making processes are:[56]

1. The functional value: an object's instrumental purpose (use value). Example: a pen writes; a refrigerator cools.
2. The exchange value: an object's economic value. Example: One pen may be worth three pencils, while one refrigerator may be worth the salary earned by three months of work.
3. The symbolic value: an object's value assigned by a subject in relation to another subject (i.e., between a giver and receiver). Example: a pen might symbolize a student's school graduation gift or a commencement speaker's gift; or a diamond may be a symbol of publicly declared marital love.
4. The sign value: an object's value within a system of objects. Example: a particular pen may, while having no added functional benefit, signify prestige relative to another pen; a diamond ring may have no function at all, but may suggest particular social values, such as taste or class.

Baudrillard's earlier books were attempts to argue that the first two of these values are not simply associated, but are disrupted by the third and, particularly, the fourth. Later, Baudrillard rejected Marxism totally (The Mirror of Production and Symbolic Exchange and Death).^{[citation needed]} But the focus on the difference between sign value (which relates to commodity exchange) and symbolic value (which relates to Maussian gift exchange) remained in his work up until his death. Indeed, it came to play a more and more important role, particularly in his writings on world events.

Simulacra and Simulation

As Baudrillard developed his work throughout the 1980s, he moved from economic theory to mediation and mass communication. Although retaining his interest in Saussurean semiotics and the logic of symbolic exchange (as influenced by anthropologist Marcel Mauss), Baudrillard turned his attention to the work of 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 a historically understood version of structural semiology. According to Kornelije Kvas, "Baudrillard rejects the structuralist principle of the equivalence of different forms of linguistic organization, the binary principle that contains oppositions such as: true-false, real-unreal, center-periphery. He denies any possibility of a (mimetic) duplication of reality; reality mediated through language becomes a game of signs. In his theoretical system all distinctions between the real and the fictional, between a copy and the original, disappear".[57]

Simulation, Baudrillard claims, is the current stage of the simulacrum: all is composed of references with no referents, a hyperreality.[58] Baudrillard argues that this is part of a historical progression. In the Renaissance, the dominant simulacrum was in the form of the counterfeit, where people or objects appear to stand for a real referent that does not exist (for instance, royalty, nobility, holiness, etc.). With the Industrial Revolution, the dominant simulacrum becomes the product, which can be propagated on an endless production line. In current times, the dominant simulacrum is the model, which by its nature already stands for endless reproducibility, and is itself already reproduced.

The end of history and meaning

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, one of Baudrillard's most common themes was historicity, or, more specifically, how present-day societies utilise the notions of progress and modernity in their political choices. He argued, much like the political theorist Francis Fukuyama, that history had ended or "vanished" with the spread of globalization; but, unlike Fukuyama, Baudrillard averred that this end should not be understood as the culmination of history's progress,[59] but as the collapse of the very idea of historical progress. For Baudrillard, the end of the Cold War did not represent an ideological victory; rather, it signaled the disappearance of utopian visions shared between both the political Right and Left. Giving further evidence of his opposition toward Marxist visions of global communism and liberal visions of global civil society, Baudrillard contended that the ends they hoped for had always been illusions; indeed, as The Illusion of the End argues, he thought the idea of an end itself was nothing more than a misguided dream:

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.[60]

Within a society subject to and ruled by fast-paced electronic communication and global information networks the collapse of this façade was always going to be, he thought, inevitable. Employing a quasi-scientific vocabulary that attracted the ire of the physicist Alan Sokal, Baudrillard wrote that the speed society moved at had destabilized the linearity of history: "we have the particle accelerator that has smashed the referential orbit of things once and for all."[61]

In making this argument Baudrillard found some affinity with the postmodern philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard, who argued that in the late 20th century there was no longer any room for "metanarratives." (The triumph of a coming communism being one such metanarrative.) But, in addition to simply lamenting this collapse of history, Baudrillard also went beyond Lyotard and attempted to analyse how the idea of positive progress was being employed in spite of the notion's declining validity. Baudrillard argued that although genuine belief in a universal endpoint of history, wherein all conflicts would find their resolution, had been deemed redundant, universality was still a notion utilised in world politics as an excuse for actions. Universal values which, according to him, no one any longer believed universal were and are still rhetorically employed to justify otherwise unjustifiable choices. The means, he wrote, are there even though the ends are no longer believed in, and are employed in order to hide the present's harsh realities (or, as he would have put it, unrealities). "In the Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization is expressed as a forward escape."[62] This involves the notion of "escape velocity" as outlined in The Vital Illusion (2000), which in turn, results in the postmodern fallacy of escape velocity on which the postmodern mind and critical view cannot, by definition, ever truly break free from the all-encompassing "self-referential" sphere of discourse.

Hyperreality

The concept of hyperreality captures the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality. Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.[63]

The study of hyperreality and the effects it has on the consumer falls under the study of semiotics and postmodernism studies. Semiotics is a tradition in the study of the philosophy of language, which focuses on the formal structures of signification and meaning making in culture. Semiotics was introduced as the theory of signs. Introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure, the sign was established as the basic unit of meaning, where two aspects of a sign coincide to project its meaning. The first being the signifier, which categorizes any material thing that signifies. This may be words on a page, a picture, facial expression, etc. The signified is the concept that a signifier refers to.[64] As the study of semiotics advances, codes are used to categorize a map of meanings. These codes are systems of ideas that people use to interpret behaviours and messages they receive. Cultural codes are specific sets of knowledge that provides reference points in the process of interpretation of signs. Thus codes connect semiotics systems of meaning with social values and structure.

The postmodern semiotic concept of "hyperreality" was contentiously coined by French sociologist Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation.[65] Baudrillard defined "hyperreality" as "the generation by models of a real without origin or reality";[66] hyperreality is a representation, a sign, without an original referent. According to Baudrillard, the commodities in this theoretical state do not have use-value as defined by Karl Marx but can be understood as signs as defined by Ferdinand de Saussure.[67] He believes hyperreality goes further than confusing or blending the 'real' with the symbol which represents it; it involves creating a symbol or set of signifiers which represent something that does not actually exist, like Santa Claus. Baudrillard borrows, from Jorge Luis Borges' "On Exactitude in Science" (already borrowed from Lewis Carroll), the example of a society whose cartographers create a map so detailed that it covers the very things it was designed to represent. When the empire declines, the map fades into the landscape.[68] He says that, in such a case, neither the representation nor the real remains, just the hyperreal.

Baudrillard's idea of hyperreality was heavily influenced by phenomenology, semiotics, and Marshall McLuhan. Baudrillard and Eco explained that it is "the unlimited existence of "hyperreal" number or "non-standard reals", infinite and infinitesimal, that cluster about assumedly fixed or real numbers and factor through transference differentials."[69] Baudrillard, however, challenges McLuhan's famous statement that "the medium is the message," by suggesting that information devours its own content. He also suggested that there is a difference between the media and reality and what they represent.[68] Hyperreality is the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced societies.[70] However, Baudrillard's hyperreality theory goes a step further than McLuhan's medium theory: "There is not only an implosion of the message in the medium, there is, in the same movement, the implosion of the medium itself in the real, the implosion of the medium and of the real in a sort of hyperreal nebula, in which even the definition and distinct action of the medium can no longer be determined".[71]

American author Micah Dunham explores the notion of hyperreality further by suggesting that the action of hyperreality is to desire reality and in the attempt to achieve that desire, to fabricate a false reality that is to be consumed as real.[72] Linked to contemporary western culture Umberto Eco and post-structuralists would argue, that in current cultures fundamental ideals are built on desire and particular sign-systems.

Hyperreality is significant as a paradigm to explain current cultural conditions. Consumerism, because of its reliance on sign exchange value (e.g. brand X shows that one is fashionable, car Y indicates one's wealth), could be seen as a contributing factor in the creation of hyperreality or the hyperreal condition. Hyperreality tricks consciousness into detaching from any real emotional engagement, instead opting for artificial simulation, and endless reproductions of fundamentally empty appearance. Essentially (although Baudrillard himself may balk at the use of this word), fulfillment or happiness is found through simulation and imitation of a transient simulacrum of reality, rather than any interaction with any "real" reality.

While hyperreality is not a new concept, its effects are more relevant in modern society, incorporating technological advancements like artificial intelligence, virtual reality and neurotechnology (simulated reality). This is attributed to the way it effectively captured the postmodern condition, particularly how people in the postmodern world seek stimulation by creating unreal worlds of spectacle and seduction and nothing more.[73] There are dangers to the use of hyperreality within our culture; individuals may observe and accept hyperreal images as role models when the images don't necessarily represent real physical people. This can result in a desire to strive for an unobtainable ideal, or it may lead to a lack of unimpaired role models. Daniel J. Boorstin cautions against confusing celebrity worship with hero worship, "we come dangerously close to depriving ourselves of all real models. We lose sight of the men and women who do not simply seem great because they are famous but who are famous because they are great".[74] He bemoans the loss of old heroes like Moses, Ulysses S. Grant, Aeneas, Jesus, Julius Caesar, Muhammed, Joan of Arc, William Shakespeare, George Washington, Napoleon, and Abraham Lincoln, who did not have public relations (PR) agencies to construct hyperreal images of themselves.[75] The dangers of hyperreality are also facilitated by information technologies, which provide tools to dominant powers that seek to encourage it to drive consumption and materialism.[76] The danger in the pursuit of stimulation and seduction emerge not in the lack of meaning but, as Baudrillard maintained, "we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us."[77]

Political commentary

On the Bosnian War

Baudrillard reacted to the West's indifference to the Bosnian War in writings, mostly in essays in his column for Libération. More specifically, he expressed his view on Europe's unwillingness to respond to "aggression and genocide in Bosnia," in which "New Europe" revealed itself to be a "sham." He criticized the Western media and intellectuals for their passivity, and for taking the role of bystanders, engaging in ineffective, hypocritical and self-serving action, and the public for its inability to distinguish simulacra from real world happenings, in which real death and destruction in Bosnia seemed unreal. He was determined in his columns to openly name the perpetrators, Serbs, and call their actions in Bosnia aggression and genocide.[78]

On the Persian Gulf War

Baudrillard's provocative 1991 book, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,[79] raised his public profile as an academic and political commentator. He argued that the first Gulf War was the inverse of the Clausewitzian formula: 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 Coalition, but using the lives of his soldiers as a form of sacrifice to preserve his power.[79]^: 72 The Coalition fighting the Iraqi military was merely dropping 10,000 tonnes of bombs daily, as if proving to themselves that there was an enemy to fight.[79]^: 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 U.S.-led Coalition and the Iraqi government were actually fighting, but, such was not the case. Saddam Hussein did not use his military capacity (the Iraqi Air Force). His power was not weakened, evinced by his easy suppression of the 1991 internal uprisings that followed afterwards. Over all, little had changed. Saddam remained undefeated, the "victors" were not victorious, and thus there was no war—i.e., the Gulf War did not occur.

The book was originally a series of articles in the British newspaper The Guardian and the French newspaper Libération, published in three parts: "The Gulf War Will Not Take Place," published during the American military and rhetorical buildup; "The Gulf War Is Not Taking Place," published during military action; and "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place" published afterwards.

Some critics, like Christopher Norris[80] accused Baudrillard of instant revisionism; a denial of the physical action of the conflict (which was related to his denial of reality in general[80]). Consequently, Baudrillard was accused of lazy amoralism, cynical scepticism, and Berkelian subjective 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 that means for the present possibility of war. Merrin argued that Baudrillard was not denying that something had happened, but merely questioning whether that something was in fact war or a bilateral "atrocity masquerading as a war." Merrin viewed the accusations of amorality as redundant and based on a misreading. In Baudrillard's own words:[79]^: 71–2

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 preserve 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 shameful and pointless.

On the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001

In his essay, "The Spirit of Terrorism," Baudrillard characterises the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 on the World Trade Center in New York City as the "absolute event."[81] Baudrillard contrasts the "absolute event" of 11 September 2001 with "global events," such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales and World Cup. The essay culminates in Baudrillard regarding the U.S.-led Gulf War as a "non-event," or an "event that did not happen." Seeking to understand them as a reaction to the technological and political expansion of capitalist globalization, rather than as a war of religiously based or civilization-based warfare, he described the absolute event and its consequences as follows:

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.[81]

In accordance with his theory of society, Baudrillard portrayed the attacks as a symbolic reaction to the inexorable rise of a world based on commodity exchange. This stance was criticised on two counts. Richard Wolin (in The Seduction of Unreason) forcefully accused Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek of all but celebrating the terrorist attacks, essentially claiming that the United States received what it deserved. Žižek, however, countered that accusation to Wolin's analysis as a form of intellectual barbarism in the journal Critical Inquiry, saying that Wolin failed to see the difference between fantasising about an event and stating that one is deserving of that event. Merrin (in Baudrillard and the Media) argued that Baudrillard's position affords the terrorists a type of moral superiority. In the journal Economy and Society, Merrin further noted that Baudrillard gives the symbolic facets of society unfair privilege above semiotic concerns. Second, authors questioned whether the attacks were unavoidable. Bruno Latour, in Critical Inquiry, argued that Baudrillard believed that their destruction was forced by the society that created them, alluding to the notion that the Towers were "brought down by their own weight." In Latour's view, this was because Baudrillard conceived only of society in terms of a symbolic and semiotic dualism.[82]

The Agony of Power

During 2005, Baudrillard wrote three short pieces and gave a brief magazine interview, all treating similar ideas; following his death in 2007, the four pieces were collected and published posthumously as The Agony of Power, a polemic against power itself.[83] The first piece, "From Domination to Hegemony", contrasts its two subjects, modes of power; domination stands for historical, traditional power relations, while hegemony stands for modern, more sophisticated power relations as realized by states and businesses. Baudrillard decried the "cynicism" with which contemporary businesses openly state their business models. For example, he cited French television channel TF1 executive Patrick Le Lay who stated that his business' job was "to help Coca-Cola sell its products."[83]^: 37 Baudrillard lamented that such honesty pre-empted and thus robbed the Left of its traditional role of critiquing governments and businesses: "In fact, Le Lay takes away the only power we had left. He steals our denunciation."[83]^: 38–9 Consequently, Baudrillard stated that "power itself must be abolished—and not solely in the refusal to be dominated…but also, just as violently, in the refusal to dominate."[83]^: 47

The latter pieces included further analysis of the September 11 terrorist attacks, using the metaphor of the Native American potlatch to describe both American and Muslim societies, specifically the American state versus the hijackers. In the pieces' context, "potlatch" referred not to the gift-giving aspect of the ritual, but rather its wealth-destroying aspect: "The terrorists' potlatch against the West is their own death. Our potlatch is indignity, immodesty, obscenity, degradation and abjection."[83]^: 67 This criticism of the West carried notes of Baudrillard's simulacrum, the above cynicism of business, and contrast between Muslim and Western societies:[83]^: 67–8

We [the West] throw this indifference and abjection at others like a challenge: the challenge to defile themselves in return, to deny their values, to strip naked, confess, admit—to respond to a nihilism equal to our own.

Reception

One of Baudrillard's editors, Mark Poster, was among a number of academics who argued for his contemporary relevance; he remarked:[84]^: 8

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 

Poster also attempted to refute the most extreme of Baudrillard's critics, the likes of Alan Sokal and Christopher Norris who see him as a purveyor of a form of reality-denying irrationalism:[84]^: 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 fulfill 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.

Only one of the two major confrontational books on Baudrillard's thought—Christopher Norris's Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War[85]—seeks to reject his media theory and position on "the real" out of hand. The other—postmodern theorist Douglas Kellner's Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond[86]—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 (discussed above) published more than one denunciation of Norris' position. The latter Baudrillard himself characterised as reductive.[87]

Douglas Kellner commented that Baudrillard's views were 'ultra-leftist' in his writing of Symbolic Exchange and Death.[26] Baudrillard later admitted that his views could be classified as right-wing "in objective terms", but found the Left–right political spectrum arbitrary.[30]

In popular culture

Native American (Anishinaabe) writer Gerald Vizenor made extensive use of Baudrillard's concepts of simulation in his critical work.[88]^{[clarification needed]}

The Wachowskis said that Baudrillard influenced The Matrix (1999), and Neo hides money and disks containing information in Simulacra and Simulation. One critic wondered whether Baudrillard, who had not embraced the movie, was "thinking of suing for a screen credit,"[89] but Baudrillard himself disclaimed any connection to The Matrix, calling it at best a misreading of his ideas.[90][91][92]

Some reviewers have noted that Charlie Kaufman's film Synecdoche, New York seems inspired by Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation.[93][94][95]

The album Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? by rock band Deerhunter was influenced by Baudrillard's essay of the same name.[96][97][98]

Bibliography

Books (English translations)

Articles and essays

• 1996. "No Pity for Sarajevo; The West's Serbianization; When the West Stands In for the Dead." Pp. 79–89 in This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia. NYU Press. JSTOR j.ctt9qfngn.7.
• 2001. "The Spirit of Terrorism." Telos 121(Fall):134–42.
• 2005. "Divine Europe." Telos 131(Summer):188–90.
• 2006. "The Pyres of Autumn." New Left Review 2(37).
• The violence of images, violence against the image.

Interviews

• Jocks, Heinz-Norbert: Die Fotografie und die Dinge. Ein Gespräch mit Jean Baudrillard. In: Kunstforum International., No: 172, Das Ende der Fotografie. Editor: Heinz-Norbert Jocks, 2004, p. 70–83.
• Smith, Richard G., David B. Clarke, eds. 2015. Jean Baudrillard: From Hyperreality to Disappearance: Uncollected Interviews. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-0-7486-9429-7.
• Smith, Richard G., David B. Clarke, eds. 2017. Jean Baudrillard: The Disappearance of Culture: Uncollected Interviews. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-1-4744-1778-5.

Audio CDs

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

See also

• Hyper-real Religion
• Reza Negarestani

References

Notes

^ a: : Baudrillard: "The matter is complicated further by the play of terminology. Neither seduction nor love being precise notions (they have no place in the great conceptual systems, nor in psychoanalysis), they caneasily switch or be confused. So if one takes seduction to be a challenge, a game where the bets are never down, an uninterrupted ritual exchange, an infinite escalation of the ante, a secret complicity, etc., one can always answer: "But so defined, wouldn’t seduction be simply love?"... "We can even invert the relation and make love something more decisive, more challenging than seduction."[99]

Citations

External links

• Jean Baudrillard Biography. Archived from the original on 20 December 2009. Faculty page at European Graduate School (biography, bibliography, photos and videos).
• Kellner, Douglas. "Jean Baudrillard". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Baudrillard, Jean (11 April 2008). Fatal Strategies. Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents (New ed.). Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781584350613.
• Jean Baudrillard (1981; translated 1994 by Sheila Glaser), Simulacra and Simulation, archived from the original on 21 May 2013.
• Baudrillard; Cultura, Simulacro y régimen de mortandad en el Sistema de los Objetos | EIKASIA PDF (in Spanish) Adolfo Vásquez Rocca
• "The world of Jean Baudrillard". Robertexto.com. Retrieved 17 August 2013.
• International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. Retrieved 9 March
• Cool Memories, association of Baudrillard's friends
• https://web.archive.org/web/20160513042009/http://ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=67#text%201
• Bacon's Essays/Of Simulation and Dissimulation by Anglican philosopher Francis Bacon
• Terror And Performance - Asymmetric Warfare, Martyrdom, And Necropolitics. An application of Achille Mbembe's study of Necropolitics to Baudrillard's notion of death.

На других языках

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- [en] Jean Baudrillard

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[ru] Бодрийяр, Жан

Жан Бодрийя́р (фр. Jean Baudrillard; 27 июля 1929, Реймс, Франция — 6 марта 2007, Париж, Франция) — французский социолог, культуролог и философ-постмодернист, фотограф, преподавал в Йельском университете.

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