RIP: Jean Baudrillard
March 9, 2007
Jean Baudrillard, long a philosophical hero of mine, has died. Baudrillard is often lumped in with other postmodern French philosophers (Lyotard, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, etc) as retrospectively incomprehensible and oh-so-passe, revered only by a few graduate students and their mentoring faculty. I think that’s generally unfair and short-sighted, but particularly so with Baudrillard, because some of the most meaningful implications of his work on media, communication, representation and counterfeits, simulations and simulacra are only just now beginning to be revealed.
Baudrillard was ahead of his time and a sophisticated thinker, but remained one of the most sensical cultural critics when it came to understanding events like the 9/11 attacks or even the cultural significance of Disney World. It’s sad to know that his voice is forever lost at a time when he is most needed.
Update: the Selected Writings of Baudrillard are available as a free PDF…
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March 9th, 2007 at 7:46 pm
Baudrillard’s formulations , however abstruse, seemed formulaic the more one parsed his pages. Umberto Eco, a clearer writer on the subject of surface appearances being passed off as authenticity, covered much the same beat in “Travels in Hyper Reality”, with a playfulness Baudrillard never displayed. At best, his expression of his ideas was a thick , lush weave of
deferring equivocation and generous portions of gravity-defying association that thrilled you for the virtuoso language he could spin to keep on the edge of your expectation, sounding as if he were about to arrive at some set of something useful. One didn’t understand a phrase or a word, but one loved to hear him talk. At worse, he reminds me of Walter Benjamin, unable to
shake his jargon lest someone find something in his writing they can interrogate in earnest.
March 11th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
I agree that Eco is a better prose stylist. Disagree with the rest of your assessment, though. Baudrillard will continue to grow in importance as we start trying to deal, in earnest, with a society transformed by media and simulation.
March 12th, 2007 at 8:07 pm
Baudrillard will continue to grow in importance as we start trying to deal, in earnest, with a society transformed by media and simulation.
We’ve been trying to “deal in earnest…with a society transformed by media and stimulation” since the Fifties, as I recall, with Vance Packard’s potent expose of advertising in “The Hidden Persuaders”, the analysis of corrupt news media in “The Image” by Daniel Boorstin, and the general reconfiguration of the psychic paradigm diagnosed and named in “The Mechanical Bride” and “The Gutenberg Galaxy” by Marshall McLuhan. And of course, let us not forget “The Society of the Spectacle” by Guy DeBord.There are endless lines of critics giving powerful analysis and indictments of the political and cultural terrain, and Baudrillard’s come-lately musings on mass-mediated in- authenticity and false consciousness as inscribed in our genetic code seems quaint, borrowed, even in his early work. The purpose of the other works mentioned here, though, is to furnish readers with some insights about social relations to give an idea of where action needs to be directed; in any sense, these books inspire thinking of workable and fairer alternatives in societies alleging to be democracies. Baudrillard, I’m afraid, has seemed like a redundant crank and a wallower in static solipsism; his last few books seemed written by a man who didn’t want to risk the gig he created for himself as the oracular sage of one-note pessimism. He is something students had to go through, like the measles, and his ideas are less relevant with each passing year.
March 19th, 2007 at 10:43 am
If you believe that there’s not both a qualitative and quantitative difference in what is happening to our society now (vis a vis media, simulation, etc), then you need to come out of the cave and look again. Your references to Packard and McLuhan make clear that you are stuck in a very old way of understanding media, generation, simulation, counterfeit, and cultural production. Perhaps your age has something to do with it?
As for Baudrillard, you’ve made your position clear. I think you’re wrong. What more is there to say? I have neither time nor inclination to educate you on the matter.
March 20th, 2007 at 10:24 am
What remains to be said should come from you, ‘though I suspect you aren’t able to make a cogent defense of Baudrillard given that you accuse me of living inside a cave (however metaphorical) and wonder whether my distaste for Baudrillard has something to do with my age. You’re assuming in cliches and exhausted tropes. I am current with the field and require no “education” from the reticent likes of you; I am, though, interested in what you have say in Baudrillard’s defense. I’m also curious if you can explain yourself without a baseless attack on someone who disagrees with you.
March 20th, 2007 at 10:28 am
Your mind is clearly made up, so I would never likely reach what you would call cogent. Then again, you haven’t either. Rolling out McLuhan’s corpse and then talking to me about intellectual exhaustion is rather ironic.
More to my concern, though, is that I posted about B’s passing. Why come here and piss on that note? You have your own blog, write about it there and those who are interested can engage. I’m not interested. Nor is an obituary post an appropriate place for you to attempt to elevate yourself, particularly at the deceased’s expense.
March 20th, 2007 at 11:00 am
You have the liberty of deleting my posts, which would ended this exchange.Since you haven’t. I’ll assume that you’re dealing in bad faith. Do yourself a favor and delete these responses and keep your memorial pristine.
March 25th, 2007 at 5:15 am
I have a longstanding rule about deleting posts– I only delete posts which are obvious spam. Otherwise I let the posts speak for themselves and represent their authors through both content and context. Your posts here, particularly the act of jumping in on a memorial item and trashing the person being memorialized, certainly makes a few points about you. I would only be doing you a favor by deleting the posts and helping you remove your foot from your mouth. I prefer not to.
March 25th, 2007 at 11:59 am
Fine then. Be well.