Jean Baudrillard; excellent Telegraph obit with a timely reference
Hyfler/Rosner
sets and photographic images of the United States. Though he
seemed to regard America as the apotheosis of hyperreality,
he nevertheless found it "much more alive" than Paris. He
might have appreciated the fact that he died the day before
the Marvel comic strip character Captain America was killed
off."
Jean Baudrillard
Last Updated: 1:57am GMT 08/03/2007 Telegraph
Jean Baudrillard, who died on Tuesday aged 77, was a
leading post-modernist thinker and social theorist best
known for his concept of "hyperreality" - the theory that
modern man can no longer tell what reality is because he has
become lost in a world of "simulacra", images and signs
created and presented as "real" by the mass media; many
regarded him as the most important French philosopher of the
last 50 years.
In fact Baudrillard was not the first to come up with
this idea - or something like it. In the 18th century,
Bishop Berkeley had theorised that all that individuals know
about an object or an event is their perception of it, a
perception placed in their mind by God. More than a century
later Berkeley's thought experiment was summarised in
limerick form by Ronald Knox: There was a young man who said
"God/ Must think it exceedingly odd/ If he finds that this
tree/ Continues to be/ When there's no one about in the
Quad", to which the reply ran: "Dear Sir, your
astonishment's odd: I am always about in the Quad/ And
that's why this tree/ Will continue to be/ Since observed by
Yours faithfully, God."
Baudrillard's theory was similar except that God's
place was taken by the mass media, his contention being that
if we live in a Disneyesque world in which our understanding
is shaped by media-driven signs, and the tools of historical
intelligibility have disappeared, how can we tell what is
real - if indeed there is any such thing as reality? This
essentially nihilist outlook led Baudrillard to some
startling conclusions, such as that encapsulated in the
title of his 1991 book The Gulf War Did Not Happen. The war,
he claimed, really existed only on a symbolic level since
neither side could claim victory, nothing had changed
politically in Iraq, and the conflict itself was largely a
staged set-piece "video game" of computer effects and CNN
graphics. More controversial still was his contention, in an
essay entitled The Spirit of Terrorism: Requiem for the Twin
Towers (2002), that the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the Twin
Towers in New York were largely a "dark fantasy"
manufactured by the media. While terrorists had committed
the atrocity, he wrote, they were only putting the finishing
touches to "the orgy of power, liberation, flows and
calculation which the twin towers embodied". The horror of
the victims in the towers, he wrote, "was inseparable from
the horror of living in them". The article provoked a
predictable outcry. "It takes a real demonic genius," wrote
one critic, "to brush off the slaughter of thousands on the
grounds that they were suffering from severe ennui brought
on by boring modern architecture."
Baudrillard had a genius for gnomic utterances such as
"God exists, but I don't believe in him"; "I feel like a
witness to my own absence"; and "The sad thing about
artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice, and
therefore intelligence." Critics complained that his
complexities amounted to pretentious gibberish and dismissed
him as a charlatan - or at best an ironic postmodern joke.
But others regarded him as a thinker of striking originality
who did more than anyone to reflect the dislocating
realities of modern consumer culture.
Baudrillard became the subject of numerous
dissertations and was one of the five or six most cited
figures in the academic firmament. He also became a cult
hero to neo-pop artists of the 1980s and 1990s, providing
them with a new jargon to explain their work. His theory
that modern reality consisted of little more than
"simulacra" seemed to justify the theory that art has no
purpose beyond its own promotion; in deference to the
theory, artists such as Peter Halley and Alan McCollum
devoted acres of canvas to works of "simulation". When
Baudrillard appeared at the Whitney Museum in New York in
1987, a journalist reported that "collectors, dealers and
artists turned out in droves, as for the Messiah". In the
science fiction film The Matrix, which was much influenced
by his theories, the hero hides illegal computer programmes
in a hollowed-out copy of Baudrillard Simulacra and
Simulation. But amid all the fuss, Baudrillard remained calm
and disengaged. "I keep a distance from the world which, for
me, is not truly real," he explained, "so the happiness
which I can have in it is not necessarily real."
The grandson of peasants and the son of civil
servants, Jean Baudrillard was born at Rheims, northern
France, on July 29 1929. After leaving the local secondary
school, he went to Paris for a year's intensive study at the
Lycée Henri IV. He studied German at the Sorbonne, after
which he found work as a German teacher in lycées. At the
same time he produced French translations of poetry by
Berthold Brecht and plays by Peter Weiss and also wrote
essays and reviews for the radical journal Les Temps
Modernes.
In the 1960s he converted to Sociology, completing a
doctoral thesis in 1966 on The System of Objects under Henri
Lefebvre. In this, he suggested that modern industrial
consumerism constituted a system under which, like
pornography, material goods shape the very needs they
fulfil, exploiting the fact that there is no limit to
consumption and that the urge to consume always leaves
people feeling unsatisfied. The thesis won Baudrillard a
post as a teaching assistant at the University of Paris at
Nanterre, where he eventually became an assistant professor
of Sociology. Though he never joined a political party, his
Marxist views led him to support the rioting students who,
in May 1968, nearly toppled Charles de Gaulle's government.
Baudrillard developed the themes of his doctoral
thesis, published in 1968, in The Consumer Society (1970) in
which he defined consumer goods as creating a "jungle where
the new savage of modern times has trouble finding the
reflexes of civilisation". In For a Critique of the
Political Economy of the Sign (1972), he argued that in our
consumer society, words and signs had become a system of
social management, whose power over our lives could only be
broken by "total revolution".
In his next book, The Mirror of Production (1973),
Baudrillard renounced his early Marxism, suggesting that
Marx's theory of workers becoming "alienated" from the means
of production was rooted in the tenets of 19th-century
capitalism and that, in consequence, his theory of political
economy was irrelevant to the 20th century. He did a similar
hatchet job on structuralism in Forget Foucault (1977). In
Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) he sought to describe the
contemporary era as a time in which society's attempts to
deny the existence of death had made it a "state of
abnormality", even as it left its symbolic mark everywhere.
It was in this work that he first came up with the concept
of hyperreality, and that media and technology-driven
culture is manipulated by "simulacra" which combine the real
and imaginary.
He developed these ideas in Simulacra and Simulation
(1981), in which he suggested that in today's society what
is real is no longer of primary importance. Disneyland, for
example, is presented as imaginary "in order to make us
believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los
Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real
but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation". Thus,
events such as murders, hijackings and natural disasters
only become "real" to us when they are interpreted as such
through the media.
In the 1980s Baudrillard began to travel to see the
world about which he had theorised. In America (1986) he
argued that the country's "resort-style civilisation", with
its microwaves, waste disposal units and the "orgasmic
elasticity" of its carpets, "irresistibly evokes the end of
the world".
Baudrillard left his post at the University of Paris
in 1987 and the same year published Cool Memories 1980-1985,
a collection of reflections on modern culture. This was
followed by a sequel, Cool Memories II (1990) then Illusion
of the End (1992), in which he suggested that the way the
media reports events such as the fall of Communism had, in
effect, led to a reversal of history. Events such as the
Cold War and the ideological revolutions of the 20th century
were being effaced from the collective memory as if they had
never happened: "the opposite of the traditional ruse in
history, in which essential changes come about unnoticed."
A stocky, rumpled, bespectacled figure who smoked fat
hand-rolled cigarettes, Baudrillard saw himself, charmingly,
if paradoxically, as a "simple man" whose basic impulses
were a dislike of culture and a love of fast cars. In later
life he developed an interest in photography and his work
was shown at public exhibitions.
His flat in Montparnasse was adorned with 50
television sets and photographic images of the United
States. Though he seemed to regard America as the apotheosis
of hyperreality, he nevertheless found it "much more alive"
than Paris. He might have appreciated the fact that he died
the day before the Marvel comic strip character Captain
America was killed off.
Jean Baudrillard was twice married and had two
children.
spi...@hotmail.com
> His flat in Montparnasse was adorned with 50
> television sets and photographic images of the United
> States. Though he seemed to regard America as the apotheosis
> of hyperreality, he nevertheless found it "much more alive"
> than Paris. He might have appreciated the fact that he died
> the day before the Marvel comic strip character Captain
> America was killed off.
And so his death is defined in terms of the simulacra he derided. How
neat.