Jean Baudrillard

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Jean Baudrillard

Biography

Jean Baudrillard, 1929 to 2007. Born in Reims to a family of civil servants, with peasant grandparents, and the first in his family to attend university. He trained as a Germanist and taught German in a lycée through the early 1960s, publishing translations of Peter Weiss and Bertolt Brecht before turning to sociology.

He completed his doctoral work under Henri Lefebvre and joined the sociology faculty at the Université de Paris-X Nanterre in 1966, where he remained until 1987. Nanterre was the campus where the events of May 1968 began, and Baudrillard's early books were written in and against that setting.

His work moved through three broad phases. The first, running from The System of Objects (1968) to For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972), applies a semiological reading to consumer society while remaining inside a broadly Marxist frame. The second breaks with Marxism, arguing in The Mirror of Production (1973) and Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) that production is itself a sign system rather than a bedrock reality. The third, from Simulacra and Simulation (1981) onward, is the work he is best known for, along with a series of shorter provocations, travelogues, and photographic projects.

He died in Paris in 2007.

Key Concepts

Sign-value. Baudrillard's addition to Marx's use-value and exchange-value. An object also carries value as a marker of social difference, and in consumer society this becomes the dominant register. What is consumed is the sign rather than the thing.

Simulacrum. A copy without an original. Baudrillard describes four successive stages of the image: it reflects a basic reality, then masks and distorts that reality, then masks the absence of a reality, and finally bears no relation to any reality, becoming its own pure simulacrum.

Hyperreality. The condition in which the distinction between the real and its simulation has collapsed and the model precedes the thing modelled. His figure for this is Borges's map, drawn at a one-to-one scale, which outlasts the territory it charted.

Precession of simulacra. The argument that models now generate the real rather than describing it, from opinion polling that produces the opinion it measures to genetic code as the template of the organism.

The Disneyland argument. Baudrillard's most cited example. Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make the rest of Los Angeles appear real, when the surrounding city is no less a simulation. The manifestly fake serves to conceal that the distinction has already gone.

Symbolic exchange. The counter-principle he sets against the sign economy, drawn from Marcel Mauss on the gift and Georges Bataille on expenditure. Reciprocal exchange that cannot be accumulated, and which he treats as the one thing the system cannot absorb.

Selected Works

Le Système des objets (1968), translated as The System of Objects La Société de consommation (1970), translated as The Consumer Society Pour une critique de l'économie politique du signe (1972) Le Miroir de la production (1973) L'Échange symbolique et la mort (1976) Simulacres et Simulation (1981), translated as Simulacra and Simulation Amérique (1986), translated as America La Guerre du Golfe n'a pas eu lieu (1991), translated as The Gulf War Did Not Take Place L'Esprit du terrorisme (2002)

Reception and criticism

The Gulf War Did Not Take Place drew the sharpest response. The argument concerns the war's status as a media event, staged and consumed at a distance through targeting footage, rather than a denial that people died, but the title was widely read as the latter and the book became the standard exhibit for critics of the position, Christopher Norris among them.

Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont included Baudrillard in Impostures Intellectuelles (1997), objecting to his borrowing of terms from mathematics and physics without their content.

Simulacra and Simulation appears on screen in The Matrix (1999), hollowed out to hold a disc. Baudrillard declined an invitation to consult on the sequels and said the film had misread him, since it restores a true reality behind the illusion, which is exactly the structure his argument denies.

Further Reading


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