Baudrillard, Jean (1923–2007)

Jean Baudrillard was a French post-structuralist theorist. From his initial engagement with sociological thought in the 1960s—studying under and later working alongside Henri Lefebvre at the Université de Paris X, Nanterre—he later emerged as one of the most formidable thinkers of his age. Much of Baudrillard's early work concerned consumption and the media. His later, more abstract work bore the imprint of this early focus, as he sought to understand the way in which the modern zeal for order, rationality, and (supposedly) solid, reliable reality has “turned back” on itself. Everything modernity sought to repress—the imaginary, fate, illusion, destiny—has returned to haunt it, generating a world of [Page 89]uncertainty and paradox that is infinitely far from the world the architects of modernity envisaged.

Baudrillard's earliest books—The System of Objects (1968) and The Consumer Society (1970)—focused on the peculiarities of an affluent society; drawing on and transforming the theoretical apparatus of Marxism, semiotics, and psychoanalysis. Yet this theoretical edifice was increasingly taken to task by Baudrillard, culminating in a thoroughgoing critique of Western modernity from the vantage point of “symbolic exchange.” In Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), the “symbolic” is pitched against the opposition between the (supposedly reliable) “real” and the (supposedly duplicitous) “imaginary.” Although this opposition is by now second nature to us, its imposition on the world is a truly modern affair. Earlier human engagements with the world were governed not by a rational calculus of exchange (analogous to commodity exchange) but by an agonistic logic of challenge (analogous to the “primitive” gift exchange and sacrifice practiced to appease neighboring clans and the gods).

Baudrillard's refusal to take “reality” at face value amounts to a recognition that reality is a human concept projected onto the world, rather than something the world itself would recognize. Only with modernity did the “reality principle” seek to oust humanity's “symbolic” relations with the world. This basic insight suffuses Baudrillard's subsequent work in a variety of guises—“seduction,” “reversibility,” “fatality,” “evil,” “impossible exchange”—all of which are intended to reveal the way in which modernity committed itself to the reality principle, thereby repressing the “symbolic.” The upshot is a world characterized by too much reality—a “hyperreal” world. In and of itself, the world is enigmatic and ambivalent. If it is forced to accord to the logic of equivalence, it is transformed into a “simulation” of itself. Baudrillard's substantive focus on consumerism, the media, and contemporary events (or mediatized “nonevents”) thus belies a more profound concern with the reality principle and its excluded other.

Baudrillard saw his early engagement with consumption as paralleling Karl Marx's transformation of the understanding of production: