| Region: | Western philosophy |
| Era: | 20th-/21st-century philosophy |
| Jean Baudrillard | |
| Birth Date: | 1929 7, df=y |
| Birth Place: | Reims, France |
| Death Place: | Paris, France |
| Alma Mater: | University of Paris |
| Thesis Title: | Le système des objets |
| Thesis Year: | 1968 |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Henri Lefebvre |
Jean Baudrillard (in French ʒɑ̃ bodʁijaʁ/,,[1], ; – 6 March 2007) was a French sociologist and philosopher with an interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as hyperreality. Baudrillard wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, critique of economy, social history, aesthetics, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his most well-known works are Seduction (1978), Simulacra and Simulation (1981),, and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991). His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism.[2] [3] Nevertheless, Baudrillard had also opposed,[4] [5] and had distanced himself from postmodernism.[6] [7]
Baudrillard was born in Reims, northeastern France, on 27 July 1929. His grandparents were farm workers and his father a gendarme. During high school (at the Lycée at Reims), he became aware of 'pataphysics, a parody of the philosophy of science, via philosophy professor Emmanuel Peillet, which is said to be crucial for understanding Baudrillard's later thought.[8] He became the first of his family to attend university when he moved to Paris to attend the Sorbonne. There he studied German language and literature,[9] which led him to begin teaching the subject at several different lycées, both Parisian and provincial, from 1960 until 1966.[8]
While teaching, Baudrillard began to publish reviews of literature and translated the works of such authors as Peter Weiss, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann.[8] While teaching German, Baudrillard began to transfer to sociology, eventually completing and publishing in 1968 his doctoral thesis Le Système des Objets (The System of Objects) under the dissertation committee of Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Bourdieu. Subsequently, he began teaching Sociology at the Paris X Nanterre, a university campus just outside Paris which would become heavily involved in the uprising of May 1968.[10] During this time, Baudrillard worked closely with Philosopher Humphrey De Battenburge, who described Baudrillard as a "visionary".[11] At Nanterre he took up a position as Maître Assistant (Assistant Professor), then French: Maître de Conférences (Associate Professor), eventually becoming a professor after completing his accreditation, French: L'Autre par lui-même (The Other by Himself).
In 1970, Baudrillard made the first of his many trips to the United States (Aspen, Colorado), and in 1973, the first of several trips to Kyoto, Japan. He was given his first camera in 1981 in Japan, which led to him becoming a photographer. In 1986, he moved to IRIS (Institut de Recherche et d'Information Socio-Économique) at the Université de Paris-IX Dauphine, where he spent the latter part of his teaching career. During this time he had begun to move away from sociology as a discipline (particularly in its "classical" form), and, after ceasing to teach, he rarely identified himself with any particular discipline, although he remained linked to academia. During the 1980s and 1990s his books had gained a wide audience, and in his last years he became, to an extent, an intellectual celebrity,[12] being published often in the French- and popular press. He nonetheless continued supporting the Institut de Recherche sur l'Innovation Sociale at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and was Satrap at the Collège de 'Pataphysique. Baudrillard taught at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland,[13] and collaborated at the Canadian theory, culture, and technology review CTheory, where he was abundantly cited. He also purportedly participated in the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (as of 2022 hosted on Bishop's University domain) from its inception in 2004 until his death.[14]
In 1999–2000, his photographs were exhibited at the Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris.[8] In 2004, Baudrillard attended the major conference on his work, "Baudrillard and the Arts", at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in Karlsruhe, Germany.[8]
Baudrillard enjoyed baroque music; a favorite composer was Claudio Monteverdi. He also favored rock music such as The Velvet Underground & Nico.[15] Baudrillard did his writing using "his old typewriter, never at the computer". He has stated that a computer is not "merely a handier and more complex kind of typewriter", and with a typewriter he has a "physical relation to writing".[16]
Baudrillard was married twice. He and his first wife Lucile Baudrillard had two children, Gilles and Anne.[17] [18] In 1970, during his first marriage, Baudrillard met 25-year-old Marine Dupuis when she arrived at the Nanterre where he was a professor. Marine went on to be a media artistic director. They married in 1994 when he was 65.[19] Diagnosed with cancer in 2005, Baudrillard battled the disease for two years from his apartment on Rue Sainte-Beuve, Paris, dying at the age of 77. Marine Baudrillard curates Cool Memories, an association of Jean Baudrillard's friends.
Baudrillard's published work emerged as part of a generation of French thinkers including Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan who all shared an interest in semiotics, and he is often seen as a part of the post-structuralist philosophical school.[20]
James M. Russell in 2015[21] stated that "In common with many post-structuralists, his arguments consistently draw upon the notion that signification and meaning are both only understandable in terms of how particular words or 'signs' interrelate". Baudrillard thought, as do many post-structuralists, that meaning is brought about through systems of signs working together. Following on from the structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Baudrillard argued that meaning (value) is created through difference—through what something is not (so "dog" means "dog" because it is not-"cat", not-"goat", not-"tree", etc.). In fact, he viewed meaning as near enough self-referential: objects, images of objects, words and signs are situated in a web of meaning; one object's meaning is only understandable through its relation to the system of other objects; for instance, one thing's prestige relates to another's mundanity.[22]
From this starting point Baudrillard theorized broadly about human society based upon this kind of self-referentiality. His writing portrays societies always searching for a sense of meaning—or a "total" understanding of the world—that remains consistently elusive. In contrast to Post-structuralism (such as Michel Foucault), for whom the formations of knowledge emerge only as the result of relations of power, Baudrillard developed theories in which the excessive, fruitless search for total knowledge leads almost inevitably to a kind of delusion. In Baudrillard's view, the (human) subject may try to understand the (non-human) object, but because the object can only be understood according to what it signifies (and because the process of signification immediately involves a web of other signs from which it is distinguished) this never produces the desired results. The subject is, rather, seduced (in the original Latin sense:) by the object. He argued therefore that, in the final analysis, a complete understanding of the minutiae of human life is impossible, and when people are seduced into thinking otherwise they become drawn toward a "simulated" version of reality, or, to use one of his neologisms, a state of "hyperreality". This is not to say that the world becomes unreal, but rather that the faster and more comprehensively societies begin to bring reality together into one supposedly coherent picture, the more insecure and unstable it looks and the more fearful societies become.[23] Reality, in this sense, "dies out."[24]
Russell states that Baudrillard argues that "in our present 'global' society, technological communication has created an excessive proliferation of meaning. Because of this, meaning's self-referentiality has prompted, not a 'global village,' but a world where meaning has been obliterated"[21] Accordingly, Baudrillard argued that the excess of signs and of meaning in late 20th century "global" society had caused (quite paradoxically) an effacement of reality. In this world neither liberal nor Marxist utopias are any longer believed in. We live, he argued, not in a "global village", to use Marshall McLuhan's phrase, but rather in a world that is ever more easily petrified by even the smallest event. Because the "global" world operates at the level of the exchange of signs and commodities, it becomes ever more blind to symbolic
"Asked about postmodernism, Baudrillard said: “I have nothing to do with it. I don’t know who came up with the term... But I have no faith in ‘postmodernism’ as an analytical term. When people say: ‘you are a postmodernist,’ I answer: “Well why not?’ The term simply avoids the issue itself.” He declared that he was a “nihilist, not a postmodernist.” (Baudrillard and Lie 2007:3–4)."; ; ;