Jean Baudrillard; social theorist (Times UK)
Hyfler/Rosner
March 07, 2007
Jean Baudrillard
Post-modernist provocateur and cultural theorist who blamed
consumerism for destroying reality
Jean Baudrillard was a leading French social theorist. His
prolific writings - more than 50 books - and his status for
many years as a cult figure among students of postmodern
theory established him as one of the most celebrated and
provocative French thinkers to emerge in the 1960s.
His interests ranged from anthropology to modern literature,
film, art and photography, and he adopted many different
styles of writing, from essay to poetry, from monograph to
aphorism. Though not always clearly understood, his writing
was influential across a broad range of disciplines that
included literature, sociology, culture and media, and
philosophy.
He was also an important influence on artists and writers -
the novelist J. G. Ballard held that he was the most
important French thinker of the past 20 years.
Jean Baudrillard was born in 1929 in Rheims, where he
attended the lycée. His education was interrupted when, in
the crucial year of preparation for entry into higher
education, he abandoned his studies and, in his own words,
"ran away" à la Rimbaud. He eventually returned to
education, however, and spent ten years teaching German in
provincial lycées.
In the 1960s he became a leading translator of German
literary and philosophical works into French, while at the
same time undertaking studies in sociology and preparing a
thesis - influenced by the ideas of Henri Lefebvre and
Roland Barthes - which would allow him to take up a
university position.
This he did at Nanterre in 1966, at a time when left-leaning
intellectuals were being increasingly radicalised in the
wave of anti-bourgeois agitation that characterised the
1960s. His major publications begin from 1968. He continued
to teach and to research in Paris until his withdrawal from
academia in 1987. Thereafter he spent much time travelling
and lecturing throughout the world and developing his talent
as a photographer - his work was shown in several
exhibitions.
Baudrillard's career as a social theorist began with two
substantial studies of affluent, modern society: The System
of Objects (1968) and The Consumer Society (1970). These
were followed by For a Critique of the Political Economy of
the Sign (1972), where sociology, semiology and Marxist
economic theory were combined. At the high point of the
influence of Marxism in France Baudrillard thus contributed,
against the more orthodox styles of Marxism, a recognition
that a profound shift had taken place with the development
of consumerism. His two studies of consumerism charted the
emergence of a society dominated not by commodities as such,
but by objects now consumed more and more for their image,
or as he called it, their "sign-value".
This transition to a system characterised by what he called
"saturation" and "obesity", among other categories of his
invention, made analyses based on scarcity, need, function
and proletarian revolt redundant. It was soon clear to him
that Marxism, like socialism, was part of the system it
sought to overcome.
What distinguished Baudrillard's response therefore was his
search for a way of analysing modern societies that still
remained radical. He sought at this period for a way of
theorising which went beyond all the various forms of
critical Marxism, developing some of the ideas and critiques
of Marxism advanced by thinkers of the Frankfurt School such
as Herbert Marcuse. Baudrillard became - and remained - an
"ultra" and increasingly he was regarded as an outsider.
During the rest of his intellectual career, Baudrillard
developed a radical new theoretical position which had its
basis increasingly not in sociology but anthropology. He had
long taken an interest in primitive social movements and he
had translated important studies on this theme in the 1960s.
His chief statement of his new ideas was presented in a
substantial study, Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976). The
characteristic form of analysis from this point was not to
apply structural techniques to the analysis of society, but
to apply what he conceived as the fundamental categories and
poetic symbolic logics of primitive societies to the
advanced societies and what he called their semiotic
cultures.
He also began to experiment with different styles of writing
that included poetry, aphorism and journal, and to break
away from the idea of writing with pure academic
objectivity.
Thus it became clear with essays on topics such as fate,
seduction, evil, illusion and symbolic exchange, that he was
attempting to produce a new kind of theory that was quite
different from Marxist theory. He called his new mode
"fatal", in contrast to critical theory, and his volume
Fatal Strategies (1983) marked another turning point in his
intellectual career.
His series of volumes containing his more personal writings
he called Cool Memories (1990-2000). These included many
different kinds of fragmentary elements, from the most
childish jottings to carefully observed comments on places
or events. Towards the end of the 1980s he also began to
develop the idea that a new post-consumer transition was
taking place in the west which required another radical
reconstruction of theory.
Perhaps his most notorious short essays - those on war,
notably The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991) - were a
fruit of this new awareness: Baudrillard predicted that no
war is possible in the advanced west. This is not because of
its political or social form but primarily because of the
virtualisation of western culture.
His writing in the 1990s was focused on what he saw as the
fundamental revolution in western culture - the very rapid
and profound shifts towards a radical uncertainty, brought
about by the introduction of information technology.
Baudrillard was one of the first sociologists to have
written on simulation and "hyperreality" - a realm created
by entertainment, communication and information technologies
which is more pleasurable and "real" than ordinary life - at
the moment that these concepts were beginning to play a
significant role in theoretical analyses of contemporary
culture and society.
The celebrity of Baudrillard's writing was clear in the
successful and stylish sci-fi film The Matrix (1999) in
which there was a visual reference to his 1981 essay on
simulacra and simulation.
Opposition, Baudrillard came to assert, could only now be
realised in the form of singularities that could in
principle never be absorbed into western cultures.
Ultimately, his writing became unclassifiable, a kind of
singularity itself. His own project, nihilism and hermetic
language were unique, lending themselves neither to
codification nor to being organised into a coherent
doctrine.
As his intellectual career developed he disassociated
himself from the academic world, particularly the social
sciences. He also became a critic of the main forms of
western politics and culture, stigmatising the doctrines of
democracy and human rights as alibis for increased western
penetration, globalisation, and elimination of other
cultures (paradoxically after having virtualised its own).
Such radicalism was not accepted by the conventional left
because it rejected all forms of political correctness,
socialism, feminism, and democratisation.
In person Baudrillard was modest and relaxed, and he
preserved an unfailing curiosity about the human dimension
and the environment of the modern world.
He was twice married and had two children by his first
marriage.
Jean Baudrillard, social theorist and writer, was born on
June 20, 1929. He died after a long illness on March 6,
2007, aged 77