Jean Baudrillard

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Jean Baudrillard wrote on an old typewriter and never at the computer. He insisted that a computer is not "merely a handier and more complex kind of typewriter", and he wanted what he called a "physical relation to writing".

  The habit seems odd for a French sociologist and philosopher who became famous for dissecting media, consumer culture, and technological communication. His best-known idea, hyperreality, describes a world where images and signs no longer point back to anything real.

  Opinion of him split sharply. A close collaborator, Humphrey De Battenburge, called him a "visionary". Gilles Deleuze, a man otherwise known for his generosity, let it be known around Paris that he considered Baudrillard "the shame of the profession".

  Baudrillard was born in 1929 and died in 2007. In between he wrote about objects, wars, terrorism, seduction, and photography. What does a theory of signs have to say about why people buy things? What did he mean when he said that reality "dies out"? And why did a thinker so often accused of nihilism insist that he was fighting against despair?

  814757679

• 2. From Reims to Celebrity

  ›

  In Reims, in northeastern France, Baudrillard was born on the 27th of July 1929. His grandparents were farm workers, and his father was a gendarme.

  At the lycée in Reims, a philosophy professor named Emmanuel Peillet (1914-1973) introduced him to 'pataphysics, a parody of the philosophy of science. That encounter is said to be crucial for understanding his later thought.

  Baudrillard became the first in his family to attend university, moving to Paris and the Sorbonne. He studied German language and literature there, and from 1960 until 1966 he taught German at lycées in Paris and in the provinces.

  Teaching did not stop him writing. He published literary reviews and translated Peter Weiss, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann.

  In 1966 he finished a doctoral thesis at the University of Paris called Le Système des Objets, or The System of Objects. His examiners were Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Bourdieu, and the thesis became a book in 1968.

  By then he was moving from German toward sociology. He took a post at Paris X Nanterre, a campus just outside Paris that became deeply involved in the uprising of May 1968. He rose from Maître Assistant to Maître de Conférences, and then became a professor once he completed his accreditation, L'Autre par lui-même, or The Other by Himself.

  The year 1970 brought the first of his many trips to the United States, to Aspen, Colorado. It also brought a meeting at Nanterre between the 41-year-old Baudrillard and Marine Dupuis, who was 25. She had just come back from a sailing trip around the world with her boyfriend at the time.

  Kyoto, Japan, drew him first in 1973, and he returned several times. In Japan in 1981 he was given his first camera, and he became a photographer.

  In 1986 he moved to IRIS, the Institut de Recherche et d'Information Socio-Économique, at the Université de Paris-IX Dauphine. He spent the later part of his teaching career there. By this point he was drifting away from sociology, especially its classical form, and after he stopped teaching full-time he rarely tied himself to any single discipline.

  His books found a wide audience in the 1980s and 1990s. In his last years he became something of an intellectual celebrity, published often in the French- and English-speaking popular press.

  He still kept faith with academic and quirky institutions alike. He supported the Institut de Recherche sur l'Innovation Sociale at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and he held the title of Satrap at the Collège de 'Pataphysique. He also taught at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and he was cited often in the Canadian review CTheory.

  In 1998 the art critic Adrian Searle described his photographs as "wistful, elegiac and oddly haunting", like "movie stills of unregarded moments". The Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris exhibited them in 1999-2000. In 2004 Baudrillard attended "Baudrillard and the Arts", a major conference on his work at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in Germany.

  His tastes ran to renaissance and baroque music, with Claudio Monteverdi a favorite, and also to rock, including The Velvet Underground & Nico.

  He was married twice. With his first wife, Lucile, he had two children, Gilles and Anne, and little is known about why the marriage ended. He married Marine in 1994, more than twenty years after they met, and she went on to work as a journalist and media artistic director.

  The doctoral thesis on objects, read by Barthes among others, held the seed of his first major argument.

  715201214

• 3. Objects and Value

  ›

  A pen writes, and a refrigerator cools. For Baudrillard, that plain usefulness was only the first of four ways an object acquires value.

  The second is exchange value, the economic worth of a thing. One pen might equal three pencils, while one refrigerator might equal three months of someone's salary.

  The third is symbolic value, which arises between a giver and a receiver. A pen can mark a student's graduation gift, and a diamond can stand for publicly declared marital love.

  The fourth is sign value, which an object holds within a whole system of objects. One pen may signify more prestige than another without writing any better, and a diamond ring may have no function at all while still suggesting taste or class.

  These ideas fill his early books, including The System of Objects, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, and The Consumer Society. At the time his politics were loosely tied to Marxism and Situationism. Yet he broke from Marx on one significant point.

  For Baudrillard and the Situationists, consumption rather than production drove capitalist society. He reached that view by attacking Marx's idea of use-value. Both Marx and Adam Smith, he thought, took for granted too easily that people have genuine needs tied to genuine uses.

  Drawing on Georges Bataille, he argued that needs are constructed rather than innate. Every purchase signifies something socially, so every purchase has a fetishistic side. Following Roland Barthes, he held that objects "say something" about their users.

  That is why he ranked consumption above production. The "ideological genesis of needs" comes before any factory makes goods to meet them.

  His early books tried to show that the first two kinds of value are not merely linked but are disrupted by the third and, above all, the fourth. Later he rejected Marxism entirely, in The Mirror of Production and Symbolic Exchange and Death.

  The contrast between the sign value of commodities and the symbolic value of gifts survived that break and stayed with him until his death.

  2025794373

• 4. Signs Without Referents

  ›

  Why does the word "dog" mean dog? Following the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Baudrillard answered that it does so because it is not "cat", not "goat", and not "tree".

  Meaning, in this view, comes from difference. Words, images, and objects all sit inside a web, and each makes sense only through its relation to the others. One thing's prestige, for instance, depends on another thing's mundanity. Baudrillard saw this as close to pure self-reference.

  From that starting point he theorized about whole societies. He pictured them forever hunting for a total understanding of the world that always slips away. The excessive pursuit of total knowledge, he thought, breeds a kind of delusion.

  His reasoning ran like this. A human subject tries to understand a non-human object. But an object can only be understood through what it signifies, and signifying drags in a web of other signs from which it must be distinguished. The attempt never delivers what the subject wants.

  The subject is instead seduced by the object, in the original Latin sense of the verb seducere. A full grasp of the smallest details of human life is therefore impossible. People who believe otherwise are drawn toward a simulated version of reality, which he called hyperreality, one of his neologisms.

  He did not mean that the world turns unreal. He meant that the faster and more completely a society gathers reality into one supposedly coherent picture, the shakier that picture looks and the more frightened the society becomes. Reality "dies out".

  During the 1980s his attention shifted from economic theory to mediation and mass communication. He kept his interest in Saussure's semiotics and in symbolic exchange, but he now read Marshall McLuhan closely. He explored how the forms of communication a society uses shape its social relations.

  The scholar Kornelije Kvas summarised the result this way: for Baudrillard, "all distinctions between the real and the fictional, between a copy and the original, disappear".

  Baudrillard told this as a historical sequence of simulacra, or stand-ins. In the Renaissance the dominant one was the counterfeit, which seemed to stand for a real referent that did not exist, such as royalty, nobility, or holiness. The Industrial Revolution replaced it with the product, which an endless production line could multiply.

  In present times the dominant form is the model. A model stands for endless reproducibility by its very nature, and it has itself already been reproduced. Everything then consists of references with no referents.

  The commentator James M. Russell, writing in 2015, drew out the consequence. Technological communication had produced an excess of meaning, so the world became not McLuhan's "global village" but a place where meaning is obliterated.

  In that world, Baudrillard argued, neither liberal nor Marxist utopias were believed in any longer.

  272619793

• 5. The Vanishing of History

  ›

  Francis Fukuyama and Baudrillard both said that history had ended, but they meant opposite things. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Baudrillard returned again and again to how modern societies use ideas of progress and modernity to make political choices.

  For Fukuyama, the end of history meant democracy had triumphed. For Baudrillard, globalization had caused the very idea of historical progress to collapse. The end of the Cold War, in his reading, was no ideological victory. It marked the disappearance of utopian visions that the political Right and Left had shared.

  He believed that the goals of global communism and of a global civil society had always been illusions. In The Illusion of the End he went further and suggested that the idea of an end was itself a misguided dream.

  He put the point with some mordant humour. Marxism invented the dustbins of history, he noted, yet with those dustbins gone, there was nowhere left to throw Marxism. "History itself has become a dustbin", he wrote, "just as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin."

  Speed, he thought, had made the collapse inevitable. Electronic communication and global information networks pushed society so fast that the line of history broke. "We have the particle accelerator that has smashed the referential orbit of things once and for all," he wrote.

  Such borrowed scientific language drew the anger of the physicist Alan Sokal.

  Russell saw kinship with Jean-François Lyotard, who argued that late 20th century society had no room left for metanarratives, such as the triumph of a coming communism. Yet Baudrillard went past mourning. He asked how the idea of positive progress still got used after it lost its credibility.

  His answer was that universality survives as an excuse. Nobody any longer believed that certain values were truly universal. Powers still invoked them in order to justify choices that could not otherwise be defended, and so to cover the harsh realities of the present, or in his terms its unrealities.

  He summed up the shift in a pair of sentences. "In the Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization is expressed as a forward escape."

  That image of escape velocity, from The Illusion of the End, points to a trap. A postmodern mind can never fully break free of the self-referential sphere of discourse, however fast it flies.

  The test of these suspicions came in the 1990s, when Baudrillard turned them on real conflicts in his newspaper columns.

  305317973

• 6. Wars Seen on Screens

  ›

  In his column for the French newspaper Libération, Baudrillard wrote about the Bosnian War and the West's indifference to it. He described Europe's failure to answer "aggression and genocide in Bosnia" and called a "New Europe" a "sham".

  His scorn fell on Western media and intellectuals, whom he accused of passive bystanding and of hypocritical, self-serving action that achieved nothing. He also faulted the public, which could no longer tell simulacra from real events, so that real death and destruction in Bosnia seemed unreal. He named the Serbs as perpetrators in his columns, and he called their actions aggression and genocide.

  He also attacked Susan Sontag for directing a production of Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo while the city was under siege.

  A far more provocative book arrived in 1991: The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. It raised his profile as a commentator, and it began as three series of articles in the British newspaper The Guardian and in Libération. The titles of the three parts followed the war: "The Gulf War Will Not Take Place" appeared during the buildup, "The Gulf War Is Not Taking Place" during the fighting, and "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place" afterwards.

  His argument turned the military thinker Clausewitz upside down. War, said Clausewitz, is the continuation of politics by other means. Baudrillard called the Gulf War "the continuation of the absence of politics by other means".

  In his account, Saddam Hussein was not really fighting the Coalition. He was spending the lives of his soldiers as a sacrifice to protect his own power. The Coalition, meanwhile, dropped 10,000 tonnes of bombs each day, as though to convince itself that an enemy existed.

  The Western media played along by broadcasting the war in real time and recycling images of combat. Saddam never used his air force, and he crushed the internal uprisings that followed in 1991 with ease. Little had changed. Saddam stayed undefeated, the "victors" were not victorious, and so, Baudrillard concluded, there had been no war.

  The critic Christopher Norris accused him of instant revisionism, a denial of the physical facts of the conflict that matched his denial of reality in general. Others charged him with lazy amoralism, cynical scepticism, and Berkelian subjective idealism.

  Sympathetic readers such as William Merrin, in Baudrillard and the Media, saw something else. In Merrin's reading, Baudrillard did not deny that events had happened. He questioned whether they amounted to war or to an "atrocity masquerading as a war". Merrin thought the charge of amorality rested on a misreading.

  Baudrillard's own words were cold. Even "the 100,000 dead", he wrote, would serve as a final decoy that Saddam sacrificed to keep his power. They also became an alibi for those who wanted proof that the war was indeed a war, and not shameful and pointless.

  3435363233

• 7. Symbols, Terror, and Power

  ›

  Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille supplied the anthropology behind a distinction that grew steadily more important in Baudrillard's later work. Signs, he said, can be traded like commodities. Symbols work differently. They are exchanged like gifts, sometimes violently, in the manner of a potlatch.

  He came to see global society as stripped of this symbolic element. It was therefore, if not militarily, then symbolically defenseless against acts such as the Rushdie Fatwa or the terrorist attacks of the 11th of September 2001.

  In his essay "The Spirit of Terrorism", Baudrillard called the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City the "absolute event". He set them apart from "global events" such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the World Cup.

  He refused to read them as a war of religions or civilizations. He saw a reaction to the technological and political spread of capitalist globalization. The conflict, he wrote, pointed past America and past Islam to "triumphant globalisation battling against itself".

  Critics came from two directions. Richard Wolin, in The Seduction of Unreason, accused Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek of all but celebrating the attacks, as if the United States had received what it deserved. Žižek replied in the journal Critical Inquiry that Wolin was guilty of intellectual barbarism, because he failed to see the gap between fantasising about an event and saying it was deserved.

  Merrin argued that Baudrillard's stance gave the terrorists a kind of moral superiority. In the journal Economy and Society he added that Baudrillard unfairly privileged the symbolic over the semiotic.

  The second line of criticism asked whether the attacks were unavoidable. Bruno Latour, in Critical Inquiry, read Baudrillard as saying that the Towers were "brought down by their own weight", forced down by the society that made them. Latour blamed this on Baudrillard's habit of seeing society only as a symbolic and semiotic dualism.

  On the 19th of February 2003, with the invasion of Iraq looming, René Major moderated a debate between Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida. It was titled "Pourquoi La Guerre Aujourd'hui?" and was co-hosted by Major's Institute for Advanced Studies in Psychoanalysis and Le Monde Diplomatique. Baudrillard treated the 2001 attacks as the primary driving force behind the Iraq War. Derrida replied that the war had been planned long before, and that 2001 played only a secondary role.

  In 2005 Baudrillard wrote three short pieces and gave one brief magazine interview on related themes. After his death they were collected as The Agony of Power, a polemic against power itself.

  The first piece, "From Domination to Hegemony", separated old-style domination from the subtler hegemony practised by modern states and businesses. He deplored the cynicism of companies that state their business models openly. His example was Patrick Le Lay, a television executive at the French channel TF1, who said his job was "to help Coca-Cola sell its products".

  Baudrillard felt that such frankness robbed the Left of its usual role as critic. "Le Lay takes away the only power we had left," he wrote. "He steals our denunciation." His conclusion was that "power itself must be abolished", both in refusing to be dominated and, "just as violently", in refusing to dominate.

  The later pieces returned to the 2001 attacks through the Native American potlatch. Here he used the wealth-destroying side of the ritual rather than the gift-giving side. "The terrorists' potlatch against the West is their own death," he wrote. "Our potlatch is indignity, immodesty, obscenity, degradation and abjection."

  The West, he wrote, throws this indifference at others as a challenge, daring them to defile themselves in return, to strip naked and confess, and to respond "to a nihilism equal to our own".

  3738403181

• 8. Critics and Afterlives

  ›

  Lyotard's 1974 book Économie Libidinale was an early attack on Baudrillard's work. David Macey saw "extraordinary arrogance" in how Baudrillard treated Foucault, and Sontag, who found him "condescending", called him "ignorant and cynical" and "a political idiot".

  Russell wrote in 2015 that the most severe critics saw him as a purveyor of reality-denying irrationalism. He added that the fierceness of the reaction could be compared in contemporary scholarship only with the criticism that Jacques Lacan received.

  Mark Poster, one of his editors, listed faults in the writing up to the mid-1980s. Baudrillard failed to define key terms such as the code. His style was hyperbolic and declarative, he refused to qualify his claims, and he built a bleak view of the world from television images while ignoring the benefits of new media.

  Poster still defended his relevance. In Poster's view, Baudrillard was not disputing that reason works when someone plans a walk to the next block. He was doubting that such reasoning gives a historically informed grasp of the present. People, Poster wrote, are no longer citizens or proletarians. They are consumers, the "prey of objects as defined by the code".

  Douglas Kellner wrote a book on Baudrillard's path from Marxism to postmodernism, and he wondered whether the later work should be read as science fiction and pataphysics or as philosophy and social theory. Baudrillard himself called Kellner's Marxist counter reductive.

  Feminist critics were sharper. In 1996 Sara Ahmed said that his book De la séduction celebrated women's status as signs and commodities circulated for male spectators and consumers. Kellner called it an "affront to feminism". In 2013 the writer Andrew Robinson, in Ceasefire magazine, found many formulations sexist, racist, and ableist, though he also credited the value of the simulacra idea for media critique.

  Even his mood was disputed. Mark Fisher called him a melancholic observer of a departed reality. Poster saw a drift from firm leftism to bleak fatalism, and Felix Guattari agreed. Richard G. Smith, David B. Clarke, and Marcus A. Doel judged him instead an extreme optimist.

  McKenzie Wark offered a reconciliation: "Everything he wrote was marked by a radical sadness and yet invariably expressed in the happiest of forms." Baudrillard wrote that we must fight charges of unreality, irresponsibility, nihilism, and despair.

  In 2005 he was diagnosed with cancer. For two years he fought it from his apartment on Rue Sainte-Beuve in Paris, and he died on the 6th of March 2007 at the age of 77.

  His ideas had already travelled far from the lecture hall. The Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor made extensive use of his notion of simulation. The American artist Joey Skaggs staged media hoaxes, including the Cathouse for Dogs and Portofess, which major news outlets reported as real.

  The Wachowskis said Baudrillard influenced The Matrix in 1999, and in the film Neo hides money and disks inside a copy of Simulacra and Simulation. The writer Adam Gopnik joked that Baudrillard might sue for a screen credit. Baudrillard instead dismissed the link and called the film at best a misreading of his ideas.

  Reviewers have also seen his imprint on Charlie Kaufman's film Synecdoche, New York. The rock band Deerhunter named an album Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? after one of his essays.

  An unexpected admirer is Cody Wilson, the developer of the first 3D-printed gun, who credits Baudrillard as his theoretical inspiration and calls him his "master".

  Meanwhile, Marine Baudrillard curates Cool Memories, an association of her husband's friends, named after a title in his own catalogue.

  7746484957