Baudrillard Thought

Jean Baudrillard (19292007) has been hailed as a genius and as one of the most forward thinking social theorists of the 20th century, who utilized Marxism and theories of consumerism first and later utilized semiotics to explore everyday life. He reveled in the role of theoretical provocateur whose major contributions to theory and curriculum studies are simulation and hyperrealitythat is, disrupting the assumption that it is possible to represent a foundational reality. Simultaneously, Baudrillard was reviled as an imposter, unnecessarily theoretically dense, and lacking in rigor. The breadth of Baudrillard's impact within curriculum studies was broad: from new media and technology studies to creating productive analytical tools for the studies of consumerism and curriculum, educational methodology, and sociology of education. The concepts of simulacra and hyperreality disrupted the ways in which curriculum might be offered and altered how researchers and theorists might consider the role of education and the construction of knowledge within educational spaces.

Baudrillard was born in Rheims, France, and was the first in his family to attend university. He taught German at the high school level and employing a largely Marxist theoretical frame, completed a PhD (under Lefebvre) in sociology at the relatively advanced age of 37. Soon thereafter, Baudrillard began his academic career at University of Paris (Nanterre).

Baudrillard's early studies, System of Objects and The Consumer Society, focused on the ways in which late capitalism precipitated a change in consumerism. Toward the end of this period, Baudrillard began to apply the work of linguist Ferdinand Saussure and relocated the focus of study from the object that was to be bought (sign usage) to the sign-value or image of the commodity. Initiating his break with Marxism, Baudrillard explored the ways an individual functions within a system of signs when acquiring and consuming goods.

Baudrillard completed his most influential work on the concepts of hyperreality and simulation from 1972 to 1982. Baudrillard interrupted the, at that time, epistemological reliance on a direct connection between a representation (that which represents the real) and the external object (the real). In this stance, a researcher or theorist could offer an authentic, true representation of that which was studied. Alternately, any representation, Baudrillard argued, were a simulacra, simulations or copies of reality without a linkage or referent to the real. Rather, signs and images (media representations, for example) have become that upon which the real is judged, analyzed and become the real upon which new representations or images rely. However as copies, they are unanchored and decontextualized reproductions of reproductions, or hyperreality. Hyperreallity questions any possibility that representations within media (and elsewhere) could be tied to the material world. Thus the material world, as the entity upon which analysis and theory rely, lost its meaning. Baudrillard argued that hyperreality replaced any possibility of real-ness; the illusion became the reality. In this spectacle of hyperreality, authenticity is lost to the illusion of authenticity borne of the image. Reality has become our simulation of it.

Within curriculum studies, Baudrillard offers avenues to, as Trevor Norris suggests, analyze the role of consumerism and the dangers of such conceptualization within curriculum where knowledge has become consumable, a commodity marked by hyperrealities, but rarely analyzed as such. That is, in the present moment, teaching, learning, and consumerism cannot be disentangled from popular culture, the spectacle of media and the imaginary representations about education, and its influences. That is, the realm of the real within schooling can be analyzed through Baudrillard's questioning of reality and our comfort with simulation.

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