Introducing Baudrillard

A Graphic Guide

Chris Horrocks, Zoran Jetvic

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781848319844
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosopher Biographies

Illustrated guide to the controversial sociologist Jean Baudrillard, who died in 2007. Did the Gulf War take place? Is it possible to fake a bank robbery? Was sexual liberation a disaster? Jean Baudrillard has been hailed as one of France's most subtle and powerful theorists. But his provocative style and assaults on sociology, feminism and Marxism have exposed him to accusations of promoting a dangerous new orthodoxy - of being the 'pimp' of postmodernism. Introducing Baudrillard cuts beneath the controversy of this misunderstood intellectual to present his radical claims that reality has been replaced by a simulated world of images and events ranging from TV news to Disneyland. It provides a clear account of Baudrillard's work on obesity, pornography and terrorism and traces his development from critic of mass consumption to prophet of the apocalypse. Chris Horrocks' text and Zoran Jevtic?s artwork invite us to decide whether Baudrillard was a cure for the vertigo of contemporary culture - or one of its symptoms

Jean Baudrillard – Con? Icon? Iconoclast?

As the Marxist critic Douglas Kellner said,
“The whole Baudrillard affair is rapidly mutating into a new idolatry of a new master thinker, and is in danger of giving rise to a new orthodoxy”.

His theoretical position has radically altered over this time…
Jean BaudriIlard’s enormous output on mass consumption, media and society stretches from the political turbulence of 1960s France to the global vertigo of the 1990s.
…from early Marxist critiques of modern consumer culture and society, through a succession of skirmishes with psychoanalysis, sociology, semiology and Marxism itself, to his rejection of theory and its replacement with an extreme “fatal” vision of the world.

Baudrillard is a contradictory character. The “real” Baudrillard was elusive- almost secretive. In seminars he seemed passive and uncertain. Yet the “virtual” Baudrillard is ferociously uncompromising — and his virulent style is met with equal force by critics who accuse him of intolerance, banality, generalization and facetiousness.

It’s not just his style they find irksome.
Baudrillard disturbs the theoretical foundations of academia, and intellectuals are wary of his popularity with the media. Academia questions his status as a “serious” intellectual.

So who was Jean Baudrillard — and what did he do to upset people?
I don’t think of myself as a philosopher … perhaps a moralist, but certainly not a sociologist.
Although he taught sociology up till the mid 1980s, it’s misleading to call him a sociologist — much of his work is intent on destroying the discipline.
It’s safe to call Baudrillard a “critical theorist” for his Marxist period and “fatal theorist” later on when his writing style sends theory beyond its limits.
I’m an aeronautical missionary.

Fasten your seatbelts …

Background… Algeria, Existentialism, Marxism

I was born in Rheims, France in 1929, just after the “first great crisis of modernity” — the Wall Street Crash.
His grandparents were peasants and his parents civil servants.

The young Jean studied hard at the Lycée, then taught German before taking up sociology. He went to university late, as an assistant at Nanterre, Paris. In 1966, he completed his thesis in sociology.

His interest in politics came with the left’s opposition to the Algerian War and his association with Existentialist Jean Paul Sartre’s (1905-80) journal Les Temps Modernes in 1962-63, for which he wrote literary reviews.

Modern society produces inauthentic relations between its members.
Only lived and experienced existence provides a philosophical platform to overcome this — not appeals to human essences.

But did Baudrillard adopt my existentialist philosophy?
No, he sided with Henri Lefebvre, the Marxist sociologist.

Sartre’s novels are quite simply boring. His philosophy turns human anguish into a mystery overcome by a superhuman moment.
That’s inhuman. Anguish is everyday fear and misery. We must reverse this slide into contempt for man and not condemn his triviality.

Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life (1958) examined social structures beyond the workplace but with an emphasis on Marx’s concept of alienation.

Baudrillard did follow Sartre’s creation of the “intellectual” as independent from political parties, “free” to build a dialogue with Marxism.

Revolution in Everyday Life

Capitalism represses the free development and exercise of physical and mental faculties.
The assembly-line worker is reduced to a mere fragment of man. Inner potential appears in alienated forms. Money is the alienated essence of man’s labour and life.

In the modern world, everyday life has ceased to be a “subject” rich in subjectivity; it has become an “object” of social organization.
We live in a bureaucratic society of controlled consumption.

Henri called for a revolution via everyday life. Even festivals would play a part.

Mass Consumption

In the 1960s, Baudrillard and his contemporaries saw a new France emerging: modernization, technological development, monopoly capitalism and a developing information society of mass consumption.

But could traditional Marxism account for or incorporate these upheavals? Was capitalism extending itself beyond the workplace or was this a radical departure?

Identify contradictions between classes in relations of production by economic analysis of the commodity?
No, Marx’s theories of the mode of production have stalled. Consumption — not production — is the basis of the social order.

Baudrillard’s first major project was to provide a critical account for the emergence and effect of mass consumption.

Structuralism

But what methodology could he use?
Fashionable Structuralism — a method which emphasizes “deep” permanent structures of languages and cultures, which contends that the “subject” is not d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Jean Baudrillard – Con? Icon? Iconoclast?
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Biographies
• Index