Baudrillard, Jean

Jean Baudrillard's (b. 1929) name has become synonymous with the flowering of interest in postmodern theory that occurred in English-speaking countries such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States during the 1980s. At the time, one of his key theoretical concepts, “simulacrum,” was the buzzword of a wildly influential “Baudrillard Scene” that stretched across academic disciplines from science fiction studies to geography, animated interdisciplinary conferences, and spilled out into performance and art spaces. Not even leisure wear was immune as baseball caps emblazoned with simulacrum were regularly sighted in North American bohemias. Baudrillard was thought by many to be the ringmaster of the postmodern circus of late capitalism. With the publication of his travelogue, America (1986), his reputation went global and earned him the dubious label of “apolitical postmodernist.” However, Baudrillard's lively account of the rupture of the French Left's “Union of the Left” strategy engineered by President François Mitterrand between 1977 and 1984, The Divine Left (1985), is a truculent commentary inspired by an uninhibited reading of Karl Marx's writing. It proves rather dramatically that Baudrillard was anything but apolitical.

The Baudrillard of the 1980s is permanently linked with the explicatory work of Arthur Kroker (1986) and the editorial labors of Sylvère Lotringer, both of whose publishing ventures played major roles in bringing his writings to an eager market.

By the 1990s, the “scene” had shifted, but without sacrificing any intensity. The posthistorical Baudrillard of notorious theses about hyperreality (Simulations, 1983), the Year 2000 (The Illusion of the End, 1992), and the death of the social (In The Shadow of the Silent Majorities, 1978) [Page 30]was much in evidence. The most grievous trend of interpretation that emerged was a widespread conflation of Baudrillard's descriptions with his positions, which reached its zenith with the claims of Christopher Norris (1992) on the occasion of Baudrillard's difficult-to-translate The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991), whose play with tenses was completely lost in English. Confusion reigned, despite the remarks of some of his French colleagues, such as activist-intellectual Félix Guattari, that he was not wrong to claim that the war will not have taken place because it was a massacre that should not have happened. In 1999, a book by Baudrillard even made a cameo appearance in the film directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski, The Matrix; later, Baudrillard turned down a consultancy role on the sequels.

That Baudrillard's fullest theoretical statements were translated only in the 1990s (Symbolic Exchange and Death [1976] 1993, System of Objects [1968] 1996, Consumer Society [1970] 1998) suggests that a corrective to the buzz of the 80s is long overdue, and a better understanding of his intellectual contributions and development is much needed.

The fanfare of the 80s and 90s should not obscure the fact that the first and second comings of Baudrillard were modest. In 1974/1975, his The Mirror of Production (1973) appeared in translation by Mark Poster within the eclectic mix of New Leftism sponsored by the Telos collective; the same group later published Charles Levin's translation of Baudrillard's For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972), an important collection that broke the mold of Freudo-Marxism by introducing, for the purposes of critically annihilating each, semiology and Marxism.

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