Baudrillard, Jean (1929—2007) French cultural critic and semiotician. Born in Reims, Baudrillard developed an early interest in German language and culture. He taught German at secondary-school level from 1956—66, and translated plays by the German authors Brecht, Bertolt and Weiss, Peter, while undertaking his university education at Paris X—Nanterre. He completed his doctoral thesis in 1966 and it was published two years later as Le Système des objets (1968), translated as The System of Objects (1996). This was followed in quick succession by La Société de consummation (1970), translated as The Consumer Society (1998); Pour une critique de l’economie politique du signe (1972), translated as For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1981); and Le Miroir de la production (1973), translated as The Mirror of Production (1975). These three books not only established Baudrillard as one of the most significant thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century, they also helped initiate the global re-evaluation of the state of society in the era of late capitalism that would subsequently be known as postmodernism. While Baudrillard himself rejected the term postmodernism, his work has always been---however unjustly---associated with that concept because the main thrust of his writing is congruent with its anti-foundationalism impulse. He has also been described as a post-Marxist because although his work contains many quite powerful critiques of Marx, it is neither anti-Marx nor right-wing. More recently critics have pointed up his debts to Situationism and Alfred Jarry’s ’pataphysics as a means of sidestepping debates about his politics, arguing that his goal was always to provoke thought rather than propound a particular doctrine. On balance, there is probably no need to choose between these classifications since each is partly true. Baudrillard’s theory, which took shape in his very first publication and was maintained throughout his life, combines Bataille, Georges’s theory of the sacred and Freudian psychoanalysis and applies it to the contemporary situation. What Baudrillard refers to as the real is in effect the equivalent of what Bataille calls the sacred, it is that which serves as the ultimate anchor and support of meaning. Secularization effectively destroys this point of reference with the result that meaning becomes unmoored and ‘free-floating’. To compensate, contemporary society has constructed numerous simulacra of the sacred, such as the media, which superficially, and in a highly artificial manner, serve the purpose of grounding meaning. But of course the manifold simulations of the real which western society has conjured can never truly replace the sacred so for all intents and purposes the real has disappeared. Baudrillard’s argument is not that there is no reality any more as he has sometimes been taken to mean. It is rather that there is nothing that can guarantee the meaning of reality. What is of particular interest in Baudrillard’s work, then, is his explanation of how we cope with the loss of the real. Baudrillard developed an elaborate system of symbolic meaning that seeks to account for the apparent addiction western society has for commodities. Instead of simply blaming this on a deterioration of national character as conservative cultural critics like Bloom, Allan did in The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Christopher Lasch did in The Culture of Narcissism (1979), Baudrillard argues that consumption is the new form of the sacred. But a sacralized commodity is also a dematerialized commodity because its value is no longer intrinsic, but attaches to it as a function of belief. Consequently, our longing for a commodity object is, symbolically speaking, more important to us than its actual possession. In effect, no matter what we have it is bound to be a disappointment, and it is this paradox that according to Baudrillard drives western culture. In the 1970s and 1980s he travelled extensively and wrote several aphoristic and elegiac books observing in minute and often hilarious detail the diverse manifestations of this paradox, which he aptly termed the ‘impossible exchange’, e.g. Cool Memories vols I—V (1987—2007), America (1988), and The Transparency of Evil (1993). Unconventional in his outlook and always willing to be controversial as well, Baudrillard attained true notoriety in 1991 when he pronounced that the Gulf War would not take place despite the fact that the UN Security Council had already authorized the use of force. Then, after the invasion had already commenced, he asked if the war was actually taking place. And finally, after the hostilities were over, he questioned whether the Gulf War had in fact taken place. First published in a series of articles for the French journal Libération and shortly thereafter published in book form as La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991), translated as The Gulf War did not take Place (1995), these essays were for many the height of postmodern folly. Given that the whole world had been able to watch the war live on CNN, Baudrillard’s questioning of it seemed to defy sense and it provoked more than a few sceptical commentators to write him off as a crank (e.g. Christopher Norris’s Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War (1992). However, this book is consistent with much that others regard as positive in Baudrillard’s work inasmuch that it questions the truth of appearances. Baudrillard did not deny that the US had sent a ground assault force into Kuwait and Iraq, but he did question whether the use of overwhelming force against a much weaker opponent could be called a war. See also consumer society; simulation; symbolic exchange. Further Reading: R. Butler Jean Baudrillard (1999). M. Gane Baudrillard’s Bestiary (1991). G. Genosko Baudrillard and Signs (1998). P. Hegarty Jean Baudrillard: Live Theory (2004). D. Kellner Jean Baudrillard (1989).
http://www.erraticimpact.com/~20thcentury/html/baudrillard.htm • Links to online resources relating to Jean Baudrillard’s biography and his work.