Literature
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist and philosopher known for his influential theories on postmodernism and hyperreality. He argued that in contemporary society, the distinction between reality and simulation has become blurred, leading to a state of hyperreality where simulations are perceived as more real than reality itself. Baudrillard's work has had a significant impact on cultural studies, media studies, and philosophy.
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10 Key excerpts on "Jean Baudrillard"
eBook - PDF- Anthony Elliott, Bryan S Turner, Anthony Elliott, Bryan S Turner(Authors)
- 2001(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
Baudrillard's work draws on a large number of sources. He himself has identi-®ed Nietzsche as the most important and long lasting. It is evident that there is a continuing engagement with and use of modern literature, from Kafka to Ballard, as well as those key theorists he identi®ed in texts of the 1970s: Marx, Mauss and Bataille, Saussure, Freud, Benjamin, and McLuhan. Because his work has entailed the development of a theory of mass com-munications he is today often linked with the work of Paul Virilio with whom he worked closely for many years on the journal Traverses . However, Baudrillard's writings in the 1990s were no longer aimed at providing a `critical analysis' of modern and postmodern culture. Critiques such as Virilio's, like Marxism itself, remained trapped, he argues, within enlightenment rationalist traditions. Baudrillard, in an ultimate challenge, tried in various ways to develop `fatal theory': philosophers have always inter-preted a disenchanted world, the point is to make it even more enigmatic. Some of his interests here have led him to adopt some of the paradoxical formulations of recent science with the result that he has been identi®ed as one of the con-temporary `intellectual impostures' ± a description he has, with usual wit, embraced enthusiastically. Thus Baudrillard seems particularly sensitive to alterations of the current cultural and political conjuncture. His writing is re¯exive to a high degree, not only with respect to the changing effectiveness of concepts and ideas, but also to the forms of the interventions 195 Jean Baudrillard themselves. Facing the defeat of the May 1968 revolutionary movement, his writing has sought to rework radical theory in a way which comes to terms with the cultural, technological, and political forms of the `advanced' societies.
eBook - ePub- Jenny Edkins, Nick Vaughan-Williams, Jenny Edkins, Nick Vaughan-Williams(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
5 Jean Baudrillard François Debrix Jean Baudrillard’s thought is terrifying for many scholars of politics who wish to explore it or apply it to their work. No critical theorist in the last fifty years has been as uncompromising about the critical thought process that has to accompany any analysis of political reality as Baudrillard. Yet, as unaccommodating as his writings appear to be, Baudrillard’s theoretical investigations are also some of the most open and free-rolling that one can find in contemporary theory. Baudrillard’s works are invitations never to accept what is given or, rather, never to take for granted whatever reality is presented to us, observers of the global political scene. Baudrillard insists on initiating pathways of thinking that place the possibility of a challenge, or défi, at the high point of any critical endeavour. Truth, reality, and facts as they are imposed by meaning and representation systems must be challenged, sometimes by way of representational terror, or by unleashing the excessive energy of that which the system seeks to control in the first place. Thus, Baudrillard’s writings thrill and bore, please and upset, liberate and frighten, no doubt because they incessantly waver between reality and irony, senseless action and brilliant illusion, mobilization and indifference, transformative possibility and stark fatalism, and intellectual assurance and radical uncertainty. To some, Baudrillard is a threat to safe thinking. He is the postmodern ‘intellectual impostor’ who mobilizes words or sentences ‘devoid of meaning’ (Sokal and Bricmont 1998: 142). Worse yet, he is the kind of thinker who celebrates ‘moral and political nihilism’ (Norris 1992: 194). To others, Baudrillard has to be championed as the ‘most intransigent’ of the French theorists (Hegarty 2004: 1)
eBook - ePubCyborgs and Barbie Dolls
Feminism, Popular Culture and the Posthuman Body
- Kim Toffoletti(Author)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- I.B. Tauris(Publisher)
There are plenty of books out there devoted to explaining Baudrillard’s ideas and charting the progress of his thinking, which are recommended if you are looking for a systematic overview of his oeuvre (see, for example, Butler 1999, Gane 1991b, Grace 2000, Hegarty 2004, Kellner 1989, Levin 1996). What I want to do here is briefly introduce you to his notion of simulation as a way of illuminating our present cultural situation and locating the posthuman within it.Many writers have used Baudrillard’s theory of simulation to make sense of aspects of the contemporary world such as the mass media (Chen 1987), advertising (Kellner 1989), and the Internet (Nunes 1995). His concepts of simulation and hyperreality could almost be considered mainstream these days. They are a standard part of many undergraduate creative arts, visual and cultural studies courses. Perhaps more significantly, they have crossed over into the realm of the popular by way of the blockbuster film The Matrix (1999), where clever references are made to Baudrillard throughout the film, especially his book Simulacra and Simulation, which the protagonist Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) holds in an early scene.Likewise, Baudrillard’s ideas lend themselves nicely to the phenomenon of the posthuman, and can offer us a way of approaching these images as something other than ‘good’ or ‘bad’ representations of the women and technology relationship. The logical question for many scholars, including feminists, is: ‘If we can no longer think about images in critical terms—that is, what they can tell us about gender, power, the differences between the sexes and the inequalities that stem from that—then how useful are Baudrillard’s theories?’ To begin exploring this question, let’s turn to the idea of simulation.The Significance of SimulationAt its heart, simulation is a theory of reality, of how we make sense of the images and objects that inhabit our existence, and in turn, ourselves and our place in the world. When Baudrillard talks about simulation, he is referring to the change in the relationship between objects and signs and the implications of this for how we understand the social order. In an age of mass production, mass media and mass communication, a sign system based in image culture has replaced our old ways of understanding social reality. For Baudrillard, this new reality is to be found in an emerging order of media and information technologies. Simulation occurs when the law of value based on a ‘reality principle’ folds:
eBook - PDF- Stephen Linstead(Author)
- 2003(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
7 Jean Baudrillard Hugo Letiche More Baudrillard than Baudrillard: Baudrillard (subject) meets Baudrillard (object) The text normally to be expected of me in a chapter such as this would recount who Jean Baudrillard is, what he has accomplished in his writings, how his ideas have developed, and (again, but on another level) what significance this all has for organizational (management) studies. 1 I would be supposed to reduce my subject (or is it, perhaps, the object?) of the chapter, in customary fashion, to a more or less comprehensible, conceptual construct. It would be assumed that there is something, i.e. a persona, hidden in a series of texts; and someone, i.e. the person, who wrote and ‘sign’-ed those ‘texts’, that could be called ‘Baudrillard’. My job supposedly would be to fill-in the ‘identity’ of the name, so that you, the reader, ‘knows’ who ‘Jean Baudrillard’ is and what that signifies. Obviously this is a very rational (logo-centric) and linear (Modernist) agenda. But when confronted by the writings of Jean Baudrillard (i.e. the texts that are branded ‘Baudrillard’), this plan meets resistance. Firstly, his ideas do not really develop that much at all. He has for thirty years been saying more or less the same thing(s). What makes matters sometimes a bit tedious is that he has even said them in different books and articles (not to mention interviews), in exactly the same words, inclusive of the same illustrations and cynical comments (‘jokes’). Reading a lot of Baudrillard, at once, as I did to write this chapter is, frankly, frustrating – it really put me off Baudrillard. His books succeed one another like a series of ocean waves; there is motion but really very little movement. To a large degree, wave after wave of energy passes through the (same) water, over and over again. Yes, each wave is a bit different from the last one, and things do get added and subtracted; but there is a lot of repetition.
eBook - PDF- Madan Sarup(Author)
- 1996(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
And what is the modern individual’s attitude to death, and how does this influence identity? Some of these topics will be raised and discussed in this chapter. I will do this by looking at the work of the French philoso- pher, Jean Baudrillard. I have selected Baudrillard for two reasons: first, he is typical of many continental theorists who have shifted from neo-Marxism to the political right. Second, his work is valuable 106 Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World in that he draws attention to the increasingly fundamental role of signs and images in a postmodernist world. IDENTITY IN THE CONSUMER SOCIETY Jean Baudrillard was trained as a sociologist, and in his early work during the 1960s and 1970s, he merged the Marxian critique of capi- talism with studies of consumption, fashion, media, sexuality and the consumer society. These texts can be read as a reconstruction of Marxian theory in the light of the new social conditions then appearing in France. France (like other advanced nations) was qualitatively different in the 1960s from the France of the 1950s. There were different analyses of this change, and thinkers had different names for these changes. Baudrillard called the new social formation ‘the consumer society’, while others referred to it as ‘the technological society’ (Ellul), ‘the post-industrial society’ (Aron and Touraine), ‘the society of the spectacle’ (Debord), or ‘the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’ (Lefebvre).1 The young Baudrillard was deeply influenced by the work of Henri Lefebvre, his teacher, and Roland Barthes. Lefebvre believed in taking seriously phenomena from everyday life where they had been neglected previously and which tended to remain separated from the domain of‘high culture’. A Marxist, he was interested in the possi- bilities of change within everyday life, and wrote influential studies on consumption, architecture, urbanisation, the role of language and culture.
eBook - PDFLiminal Acts
A Critical Overview of Contemporary Performance and Theory
- Susan Broadhurst(Author)
- 1999(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
Just as the revolution of modernity was grounded in the dialectics of history, in the postmodern theories float around as if in a void. Everything is visible, explicit and transparent; for Baudrillard, this means 'obscene'. Baudrillard claims that even art has lost its critical function: 'truly art can no longer operate as a radical critique or destructive metaphor' (1984b, p. 22). All targets of oppositional art have been destroyed and therefore art has lost its critical effectivity. Referring to the hyperreality of art, he observes that The anti-theatre is the ecstatic form of theatre: no more stage, no more content; ... theatre for everyone by everyone. ... The more art tries to realize itself, the more it hyperrealizes itself, the more it transcends itself to find its own empty essence' (1988, p. 187). Baudrillard argues that 'works of art' can no longer be exchanged since they have no relation to any referential value. Nor do they have any secret complicity and they cannot be read; rather, they can only be decoded according to 'more and more contradictory criteria'. Therefore, 'One can even say that the blazing fire of advertising and media in art is directly proportional to the impossibility of any aesthetic Judgement' (Baudrillard, 1982a, pp. 11—14). All that art and presumably politics, theory and individuals can do is play with forms already produced, 'all that remains to be done is to play with the pieces'. Postmodernism 'is more a survival among the remnants than anything else' (Baudrillard, 1984b, pp. 24—5). Baudrillard's theory of 'aesthetic determinacy' is important for liminal performance in as much as he believes that everyday life has become aestheticized and much of this performance encourages the blurring of borders. However, this need not necessarily point to the disappearance of art, as Baudrillard claims; it could just as well point to its universal pervasiveness; not to a 'scene of nihilism' but to a redefinition of 'meaning'.
- Evan Gottlieb(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
chora, a womb-like space that precedes signification; and Irigaray synthesized deconstruction and psychoanalysis to emphasize the continuities between female biological and discursive characteristics. Structuralist and poststructuralist approaches to discourse analysis were also richly absorbed and redeployed by many postcolonial and, more recently, critical race theorists, from Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak among the former to Gloria Anzaldúa and bell hooks among the latter. In what follows, I focus on three contemporary theorists who take the concept of discourse and its related implications in original, broadly influential directions. First, I review the oeuvre of Jean Baudrillard; once considered – and frequently dismissed – as merely a kind of “high priest” of postmodernism, his career-spanning investigation of discursive transformations in the age of consumer capitalism deserves a careful second look. I turn then to Giorgio Agamben, an Italian philosopher who combines Foucault’s interest in genealogy, Derrida’s commitment to the power of language, and his own interests in the origins of the law and Christianity, among other topics. Third, I consider Rey Chow, a prominent discourse theorist with a keen understanding of how languages, images, and bodies are deployed to produce as well as maintain forms of inequality.Jean Baudrillard: prophet of the postmodern
Unlike critics such as Eagleton and Jameson, Baudrillard – who died in 2007 – was generally perceived as a supporter rather than an opponent of all things postmodern. This facile reading, however, misunderstands his purposefully provocative oeuvre. Like the theorists profiled in Chapter 1 , Baudrillard began his career with a strong grounding in Marxist theory. His training as a sociologist, however, led him to suspect that most Western Marxists – and perhaps Marx himself – had hamstrung their analyses of capitalism by focusing too heavily on the production side of the system. By contrast, what mattered more in Baudrillard’s analyses – at least by the 1960s, when he began publishing seriously – was consumption. This demand-side focus, combined with structuralist semiotics and then Derridean poststructuralism, allowed Baudrillard to produce a novel set of ideas regarding the homologous functions of commodities and representations – and, eventually, of representations as
eBook - PDF- Mary Klages(Author)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
What is being signified is in fact your position(s) as a subject; according to Baudrillard, identity (subjecthood) is thus a product of the signifiers with which one surrounds oneself, rather than something essential that is unique to each individual, as in the humanist model. Selfhood, for Baudrillard, as for Lacan, is thus always already an alienated position, something defined by externals. Baudrillard takes this idea of the signifier–signified relationship further in discussing one of his best-known ideas, the concept of the simulacrum . He starts with the idea that the signifier–signified relationship is a relationship of a symbol to a notion of ‘reality’ – signifiers are representations (words, pictures, symbols, whatever) that point to something beyond or outside of themselves, something which supposedly has a reality of its own, regardless of how it is rep-resented. A chair, for instance, just is, whether we designate it by the word ‘chair’ or by some other signifier; the object with four legs and a seat continues to exist no matter what we call it, or even whether we call it anything. In the world of mass media which Baudrillard studies, however, there is no signified, no reality, no level of simple existence to which signifiers refer. Rather, Baudrillard says, there are only signifiers with no signifieds; there are only pictures of chairs without any real chairs ever being referred to or existing. He calls this separation of signifier from signified a ‘simulacrum,’ a repre-sentation without an original that it copies. Simulacra (the plural of simulacrum) don’t mirror or reproduce or imitate or copy reality: they are reality itself, says Baudrillard. In Western thought since Plato, Baudrillard points out, the idea of an original or real thing has always been favored over the idea of an imitation or a copy.
- Jon Stewart(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Jean Baudrillard: The Seduction of Jean Baudrillard Stuart KendallFrench cultural critic Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) developed an original method of cultural criticism in significant part from his reading of Søren Kierkegaard’s fictional presentation of the act of seduction in “The Seducer’s Diary.” For Baudrillard, seduction came to serve as an analogue to critical thought in general and a precursor to an entire range of what he later called “fatal strategies” of individual freedom. Though crucial to his own development, Baudrillard’s reading of Kierkegaard in general and of “The Seducer’s Diary” in particular was not itself a critical or thorough reading. Rather, he subjected the text to a species of speculative interpretation and used it as the basis for protracted extrapolation into a wide range of other cultural spheres and critical concerns. This in mind, it is unsurprising that tracing Baudrillard’s engagement with Kierkegaard should tell us more about Baudrillard and his readers than it does about Kierkegaard.I.
Across more than fifty books and pamphlets published between 1968 and his death in 2007, Jean Baudrillard established an international reputation as a critic of contemporary culture. Principally though often inaccurately identified with postmodernism, Baudrillard’s writings amalgamate and transcend several distinct critical and creative discourses—Marxism, psychoanalysis, semiology, anthropology, media studies, pataphysics—to forge an original and unclassifiable, interdisciplinary form of post-Marxist cultural criticism. Trained as a sociologist, Baudrillard taught for more than twenty years at the University of Paris, most notably at the Nanterre campus, as his international reputation spread. In the decades prior to his death, Baudrillard traveled widely, as a lecturer and visiting professor, in the United States, Japan, Brazil, Spain, Chile, Venezuela, Columbia, and Australia, among other locales, while continuing to produce trenchant and often controversial cultural commentary on such events as the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf and the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001.
eBook - ePub- Chris Rojek, Professor Bryan S Turner, Bryan Turner(Authors)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Indeed, a global technological system could become the basis of a universalistic culture. Although he was fully aware of the sensory deprivation which he associated with the impact of the mass media, he none the less remained committed to the hope that these negative effects were not fatal. Baudrillard, who as we have noted was deeply influenced by McLuhan’s idea that the content of messages was relatively unimportant in relation to their form, has embraced a very nihilistic position with respect to our processed environment. Baudrillard’s pessimistic view of the fissure in the historical development of the modern is based on his view of the masses. Baudrillard’s analysis of the masses is a product of the Situationist responses to the May events of 1968, when it became increasingly obvious that the critical social movements of modern society would not be dominated by Marxist theory or directed by a vanguard of the working class. The crisis of May 1968 had not been predicted by Marxism or by mainstream sociology, but they did validate the claims of Situationists like Guy Debord in the journal Internationale Situationiste. However, if the crisis had been unanticipated by conventional political analysis, then the sudden collapse of the students’ and workers’ movements of 1968 found no easy explanation in the framework of mainstream social sciences. Baudrillard’s concept of the inexplicable nature of the mass depend a great deal on the unusual circumstances surrounding the May events. By 1973 with the publication of The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975), Baudrillard was already moving away from an orthodox Marxist view of production, arguing that Marxism, far from being an external critique of capitalism, was merely a reflection or mirror of the principal economistic values of capitalism. Instead of engaging in the production of meaning, a subversive, oppositional movement would have to challenge the system from the point of view of meaninglessness
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