Jean
Baudrillard (1929-2007) was
at once a confounding and playful thinker, who achieved
remarkable originality and insightfulness in his interdisciplinary amalgam
of sociology, culture studies, media theory, political economy, semiotics
and psychoanalysis, all of which contribute to a profound meditation on the
character of our “hyper” capitalist age. A long-time leading figure in
French intellectual circles, Jean
Baudrillard participated in the attempt to provide a new
theoretical framework for the Left which would challenge many of the
structuralist and modernist tenets of classical Marxist political economy
and social theory. Perhaps the most important philosophical movement this
century has been the postmodernism and post-structuralism
which in part emerged from this project. With its roots in Nietzsche and
Heidegger and the linguistics of Saussure, and grounded in the
deconstruction of metaphysics and the “linguistic turn” towards considering
the character of discourse and communication, postmodernism has radically
and permanently altered the landscape of Western philosophy.
Born in 1929 in Reims, France, Jean Baudrillard studied sociology under Henri Lefebvre, and taught during several tumultuous decades at Nanterre, beginning shortly before the student uprising of May 1968. That same year saw the publication of his first book, The System of Objects, a study of the meaning derived from consumption as the process by which human social relations become mediated by objects. Jean Baudrillard sought to provide an understanding of the new “hyper” form of advanced capitalism and technology which emerged through the virtual and simulated character of contemporary experience. His account of the “implosion of meaning” entailed by the proliferation of signs and the reduction of the sign to the status of commodity points toward the simultaneous experience of the loss of reality and the encounter with hyperreality.
In The Consumer Society Jean Baudrillard outlines how consumers buy into the “code” of signs rather than the meaning of the object itself. His analysis of the process by which the sign ceases pointing towards an object or signified which lies behind it, but rather to other signs which together constitute a cohesive yet chaotic “code”, culminates in the “murder of reality”. The rupture is so complete, the absence so resounding, and the code so “totalitarian” that Baudrillard speaks of the combined “violence of the image” and “implosion of meaning”. Politics, religion, education, any human undertaking is swept up and absorbed by this process and ultimately neutralized; any liberating activity becomes complicit in the reproduction of its opposite. “The code is totalitarian; no one escapes it: our individual flights do not negate the fact that each day we participate in its collective elaboration.”[1]
More recently, Jean Baudrillard’s preoccupation with the simulated and his radical questioning of what remains of the “real” led him to such provocative statements as “the gulf war did not take place”[2] and “the collapse of the towers of the World Trade Center is unimaginable, but that is not enough to make it a real event.”[3]
Jean Baudrillard’s radical questioning of the character of signs, symbols and simulation in our postmodern age points towards the necessity to reconsider the role of contemporary educational practices as a possible site of resistance to the ‘code’. Is education invariably complicit in the “murder of the real”?
Jean Baudrillard died March 6, 2007.
Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. J. Benedict (Trans). Verso Books. London and New York, 1996 (1968)
Baudrillard, Jean. Consumer Society : Myths and Structures (Theory, Culture and Society). G. Ritzer (Translation). Sage Publications. London, 1997 (1970).
Baudrillard, Jean. The Mirror of Production. St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975.
Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981.
Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction. New York: Semiotext: 1983.
Baudrillard, Jean. Forget Foucault. New York: Semiotext, 1987.
Baudrillard, Jean. Fatal Strategies. New York: Semiotext, 1990.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. J. Benedict (Trans.) London: Verso, 1993.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulations. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Callinicos, Alex, "The Mirror of Commodity Fetishism: Baudrillard and Late Capitalist Culture," in Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (NY: St. Martin's, 1990) 144-153.
Danto, Arthur C., "The Hyper-Intellectual," New Republic 3947/8 (10 & 17 September 1990) 44-48.
Howe, Stephen, "America: Where Dreams Come True," New Statesman and Society 1:24 (18 November 1988) 39.
Levin, Charles, "Baudrillard, Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis," CJPST 8:1-2 (1984) 35-51.
Kellner, Douglas, "Baudrillard, Semiurgy and Death," Theory, Culture & Society 4 (1987) 125-46.
Kellner, Douglas, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (Stanford: 1989). [JBMB]
Kroker, Arthur, "The Arc of a Dead Power: Magritte/Baudrillard/Augustine," CJPST 8:1-2 (1984) 53-69. [MBA]
Wernick, Andrew, "Sign and Commodity: Aspects of the Cultural Dynamic of Advanced Capitalism," CJPST 8:1-2 (1984) 17-34.
http://www.mtsu.edu/~jpurcell/Philosophy/baudrillard.html
http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/baudweb.html
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jeanbaudrillard.html
http://www.popcultures.com/theorists/baudrillard.html
[1] Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects. J. Benedict (Trans). Verso Books. London and New York, 1996 (1968), page 22.
[2] Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Bloomington & Indianapolis, Indiana University Press; 1995.
[3] Jean Baudrillard, “The Spirit of Terrorism”, Le Monde, 2 November 2001.
For an obituary see: Steven Poole 'Jean Baidrillard, The Guardian March 8, 2007 pp. 38-9) http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,2028464,00.html
How to cite this article: Norris, T. 'Jean Baudrillard', the encyclopaedia of informal education, www.infed.org/thinkers/baudrillard.htm.
Trevor Norris, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.
© 2004 Trevor Norris
