Jean Baudrillard

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Baudrillard, Jean (b. 1929). French sociologist and cultural critic. He became known as a translator and critic of left-wing literature, which he combined with a career as a sociologist, culminating with a chair at Nanterre. He joined the Tel Quel group, which was reformulating Marxism from a New Left perspective, and extended his criticism of the prevailing capitalist ideologies to encompass Marxist ideologies. Disillusioned by the failure of the Left after May 1968, he argued that the proliferation of communications media in modern society has drowned out meaning and severed links between signs and their referents, whose reality must therefore be regarded as problematic (La Société de consommation, 1964). Often associated with Postmodernism, he both castigates and celebrates the social and intellectual disintegration he describes. An English translation of his Selected Writings was published in 1988.

[Michael Kelly]

Baudrillard, Jean (1929- ) French sociologist and critical theorist. A guru of postmodernism, Baudrillard is best-known as a critic of contemporary culture. His polemical works include Forget Foucault (1977, trs. 1989) and The Gulf War did Not Take Place (1991, trs. 1995). The latter is not, as it may sound, a piece of revisionist history, but a meditation on the way in which listeners and viewers are trapped in a maelstrom of stories, scripts, paradigms and icons determining how the media present events, to the extent that they in effect live in a virtual reality.

Quotes:

"Depression moods lead, almost invariably, to accidents. But, when they occur, our mood changes again, since the accident shows we can draw the world in our wake, and that we still retain some degree of power even when our spirits are low. A series of accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange power."

"Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust."

"A society which allows an abominable event to burgeon from its dung heap and grow on its surface is like a man who lets a fly crawl unheeded across his face or saliva dribble from his mouth -- either epileptic or dead."

"Man has lost the basic skill of the ape, the ability to scratch its back. Which gave it extraordinary independence, and the liberty to associate for reasons other than the need for mutual back-scratching."

"We are no longer in a state of growth; we are in a state of excess. We are living in a society of excrescence. The boil is growing out of control, recklessly at cross purposes with itself, its impacts multiplying as the causes disintegrate."

"Terror is as much a part of the concept of truth as runniness is of the concept of jam. We wouldn't like jam if it didn't, by its very nature, ooze. We wouldn't like truth if it wasn't sticky, if, from time to time, it didn't ooze blood."

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