Jean Baudrillard

First published Fri Apr 22, 2005; substantive revision Wed Dec 18, 2019

Associated with postmodern and poststructuralist theory, JeanBaudrillard (1929–2007) is difficult to situate in relation totraditional and contemporary philosophy. His work combines philosophy,social theory, and an idiosyncratic cultural metaphysics that reflectson key events and phenomena of the epoch. A sharp critic ofcontemporary society, culture, and thought, Baudrillard is often seenas a major guru of French postmodern theory, although he can also beread as a thinker who combines social and cultural criticism inoriginal and provocative ways and a writer who has developed his ownstyle and forms of writing. He was an extremely prolific author who haspublished over fifty books and commented on some of the most salientcultural and sociological phenomena of the contemporary era, includingthe erasure of the distinctions of gender, race, and class thatstructured modern societies in a new postmodern consumer, media, andhigh tech society; the mutating roles of art and aesthetics;fundamental changes in politics, culture, and human beings; and theimpact of new media, information, and cybernetic technologies in thecreation of a qualitatively different social order, providingfundamental mutations of human and social life.

For some years a cult figure of postmodern theory, Baudrillard movedbeyond the postmodern discourse from the early 1980s to his death in2007, and in his later writings developed a highly idiosyncratic modeof philosophical and cultural analysis. This entry focuses on thedevelopment of Baudrillard’s unique modes of thought and how hemoved from social theory to postmodern theory to a provocative type ofphilosophical analysis.^[1]Inretrospect, Baudrillard can be seen a theorist who has traced inoriginal ways the life of signs and impact of technology on sociallife, and who has systematically criticized major modes of modernthought, while developing his own philosophical perspectives.

1. Early Writings: From theSystem of Objects toThe Mirror of Production

Jean Baudrillard was born in the cathedral town of Reims, France in1929. He told interviewers that his grandparents were peasants and hisparents became civil servants (Gane 1993: 19). Baudrillard also claimsthat he was the first member of his family to pursue an advancededucation and that this led to a rupture with his parents and culturalmilieu. In 1956, he began working as a professor of secondary educationin a French high school (Lyceé) and in the early 1960s dideditorial work for the French publisher Seuil. Baudrillard wasinitially a Germanist who published essays on literature inLestemps modernes in 1962–1963 and translated works of Peter Weissand Bertolt Brecht into French, as well as a book on messianicrevolutionary movements by Wilhelm Mühlmann. During this period,he met and studied the works of Henri Lefebvre, whose critiques ofeveryday life impressed him, and Roland Barthes, whose semiologicalanalyses of contemporary society had lasting influence on his work.

In 1966, Baudrillard entered the University of Paris, Nanterre, andbecame Lefebvre’s assistant, while studying languages,philosophy, sociology, and other disciplines. He defended his“These de Troisième Cycle” in sociology at Nanterrein 1966 with a dissertation on “Le système desobjects,” and began teaching sociology in October of that year.Opposing French and U.S. intervention in the Algerian and Vietnamesewars, Baudrillard associated himself with the French Left in the 1960s.Nanterre was a key site of radical politics and the “March 22movement,” associated with Daniel Cohn-Bendit and theenragés, began in the Nanterre sociology department.Baudrillard said later that he participated in the events of May 1968that resulted in massive student uprisings and a general strike thatalmost drove de Gaulle from power.

During the late 1960s, Baudrillard published a series of books thatwould eventually make him world famous. Influenced by Lefebvre,Barthes, and a series of French thinkers whose influence will bediscussed below, Baudrillard undertook serious work in the field ofsocial theory, semiology, and psychoanalysis in the 1960s and publishedhis first bookThe System of Objects in 1968 (1996), followedby a book onThe Consumer Society in 1970 (1998), andFora Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign in1972 (1981).^[2]These earlypublications are attempts, within the framework of critical sociology,to combine the studies of everyday life initiated by Lefebvre (1971 and1991 [1947]) with a social semiology that studies the life of signs insocial life. This project, influenced by Barthes (1967 [1964], 1972[1958], and 1983 [1967]), centers on the system of objects in theconsumer society (the focus of his first two books), and the interfacebetween political economy and semiotics (the nucleus of histhird book).^[3]Baudrillard’searly work was one of the first to appropriate semiology to analyze howobjects are encoded with a system of signs and meanings that constitutecontemporary media and consumer societies. Combining semiologicalstudies, Marxian political economy, and sociology of the consumersociety, Baudrillard began his life-long task of exploring the systemof objects and signs which forms our everyday life.

The early Baudrillard described the meanings invested in the objectsof everyday life (e.g., the power accrued through identification withone’s automobile when driving) and the structural system throughwhich objects were organized into a new modern society (e.g., theprestige orsign-value of a new sports car). In his firstthree books, Baudrillard maintained that the classical Marxian critiqueof political economy needed to be supplemented by semiological theoriesof the sign which articulated the diverse meanings signified bysignifiers into languages organized into systems of meaning.Baudrillard, following Barthes and others, argued that fashion, sports,the media, and other modes of signification produced systems of meaningarticulated by specific rules, codes, and logics (terms used somewhatinterchangeably by Baudrillard which are elucidated in more detailbelow).

Situating his analysis of signs, language, and everyday life in ahistorical framework, Baudrillard argued that the transition from theearlier stage of competitive market capitalism to the stage of monopolycapitalism required increased attention to demand management, toaugmenting and steering consumption. At this historical stage, fromaround 1920 to the 1960s, the need to intensify demand supplementedconcern with lowering production costs and with expanding production.In this era of capitalist development, economic concentration, newproduction techniques, and the development of new technologies,accelerated capacity for mass production and capitalist corporationsfocused increased attention on managing consumption and creating needsfor new prestigious goods, thus producing the regime of whatBaudrillard has calledsign-value.

On Baudrillard’s analysis, advertising, packaging, display,fashion, “emancipated” sexuality, mass media and culture,and the proliferation of commodities multiplied the quantity of signsand spectacles, and produced a proliferation of sign-value. Henceforth,Baudrillard claims, commodities are not merely to be characterized byuse-value and exchange value, as in Marx’s theory of thecommodity, but sign-value — the expression and mark of style,prestige, luxury, power, and so on — becomes an increasinglyimportant part of the commodity and consumption (see Goldman and Papson1996).

From this perspective, Baudrillard claims that commodities arebought and displayed as much for their sign-value as their use-value,and that the phenomenon of sign-value has become an essentialconstituent of the commodity and consumption in the consumer society.This position was influenced by Veblen’s notion of“conspicuous consumption” and display of commoditiesanalyzed in hisTheory of the Leisure Class that Baudrillardargued has become extended to everyone in the consumer society. ForBaudrillard, the entire society is organized around consumption anddisplay of commodities through which individuals gain prestige,identity, and standing. In this system, the more prestigiousone’s commodities (houses, cars, clothes, and so on), the higherone’s standing in the realm of sign value. Thus, just as wordstake on meaning according to their position in a differential system oflanguage, so sign values take on meaning according to their place in adifferential system of prestige and status.

InThe Consumer Society, Baudrillard concludes by extolling“multiple forms of refusal” of social convention,conspicuous consumption, and conformist thought and behavior, all ofwhich can be fused in a “practice of radical change” (1998:183). He alludes here to the expectation of “violent eruptionsand sudden disintegration which will come, just as unforeseeably and ascertainly May 68, to wreck this white mass” [of consumption](1998: 196). On the other hand, Baudrillard also describes a situationwhere alienation is so total that it cannot be surpassed because“it is the very structure of market society” (1998: 190).His argument is that in a society where everything is a commodity thatcan be bought and sold, alienation is total. Indeed, the term“alienation” originally signified “to sale,”and in a totally commodified society, alienation is ubiquitous.Moreover, Baudrillard posits “the end of transcendence” (aphrase borrowed from Marcuse) where individuals can neither perceivetheir own true needs or another way of life (1998: 190ff).

Baudrillard and Neo-Marxism

By 1970, Baudrillard has distinguished himself from the Marxisttheory of revolution and instead postulates only the possibility ofrevolt against the consumer society in an “unforeseeable butcertain” form. In the late 1960s, he had associated himself witha group of intellectuals around the journalUtopie whichsought to overcome disciplinary boundaries and in the spirit of GuyDebord and the Situationist International to combine reflections onalternative societies, architecture, and modes ofeveryday life.^[4]Bringing togetherindividuals on the margins of architecture, city planning, culturalcriticism and social theory, Baudrillard and his associatesdistinguished themselves from other political and theoretical groupingsand developed idiosyncratic and marginal discourse beyond theboundaries of established disciplines and political tendencies. Thisaffiliation withUtopie only lasted into the early 1970s, butit may have helped produce in him a desire to work on the margins, tostand aside from current trends and fads, and to develop his owntheoretical positions. His articles from this project have beencollected in English translation inUtopia Deferred(2006a).

Baudrillard thus had an ambivalent relation to classical Marxism bythe early 1970s. On one hand, he carried forward the Marxian critiqueof commodity production which delineates and criticizes various formsof alienation, domination, and exploitation produced by capitalism. Atthis stage, it appeared that his critique takes place from the standardneo-Marxian vantage point which assumes that capitalism is blameworthybecause it is homogenizing, controlling and dominating social life,while robbing individuals of their freedom, creativity, time and humanpotentialities. On the other hand, he cannot point to any revolutionaryforces and in particular did not discuss the situation and potential ofthe working class as an agent of change in the consumer society.Indeed, Baudrillard has no theory of the subject as an active agent ofsocial change whatsoever, thus following the structuralist andpoststructuralist critique of the philosophical and practical subjectcategorized by Descartes, Kant, and Sartre which was long dominant inFrench thought. Structuralists and poststructuralists argued thatsubjectivity was produced by language, social institutions, andcultural forms and was not independent of its construction in theseinstitutions and practices.

Nor does Baudrillard develop a theory of class or group revolt, orany theory of political organization, struggle, or strategy of the sortfrequent in post-1960s France. Yet Baudrillard’s work here isparticularly close to the work of the Frankfurt school, especially thatof Herbert Marcuse, who had already developed some of the first Marxistcritiques of the consumer society (see Kellner 1984 and 1989b). LikeLukàcs (1971) and the Frankfurt School, Baudrillard analyzes howthe commodity and commodification permeate social life and come todominate individual thought and behavior. Following the general line ofcritical Marxism, Baudrillard argues that the process of socialhomogenization, alienation, and exploitation constitutes a process ofreification in commodities, technologies, and things (i.e.,“objects”) come to dominate people (“subjects”)divesting them of their human qualities and capacities.

For Lukàcs, the Frankfurt School, and Baudrillard,reification — the process whereby human beings becomedominated by things and become more thinglike themselves — comesto govern social life. Conditions of labor imposed submission andstandardization on human life, as well as exploiting workers andalienating them from a life of freedom and self-determination. In amedia and consumer society, culture and consumption also becamehomogenized, depriving individuals of the possibility of cultivatingindividuality and self-determination.

In a sense, Baudrillard’s work can be read as an account of afurther stage of reification and social domination than that describedby the Frankfurt School who described how individuals were controlledby ruling institutions and modes of thought. Baudrillard goes beyondthe Frankfurt School by applying the semiological theory of the sign todescribe how commodities, media, and technologies provide a universe ofillusion and fantasy in which individuals become overpowered byconsumer values, media ideologies and role models, and seductivetechnologies like computers which provide worlds of cyberspace.Eventually, he will take his analysis of domination by signs and thesystem of objects to even more pessimistic conclusions where heconcludes that the thematic of the “end of the individual”sketched by the Frankfurt School has reached its fruition in the totaldefeat of human subjectivity by the object world (seeSection 3).

Yet in some writings, Baudrillard has a somewhat more active theoryof consumption than that of the Frankfurt School’s that generallyportrays consumption as a passive mode of social integration. Bycontrast, consumption in Baudrillard’s early writings is itself akind of labor, “an active manipulation of signs,” a way ofinserting oneself within the consumer society, and working todifferentiate oneself from others. Yet this active manipulation ofsigns is not equivalent to postulating an active human subject thatcould resist, redefine, or produce its own signs, thus Baudrillardfails to develop a genuine theory of agency.

Baudrillard’s first three works can thus be read in theframework of a neo-Marxian critique of capitalist societies. One couldread Baudrillard’s emphasis on consumption as a supplement toMarx’s analysis of production and his focus on culture and signsas an important supplement to classical Marxian political economy,which adds a cultural and semiological dimension to the Marxianproject. But in his 1973 provocation,The Mirror of Production(translated into English in 1975), Baudrillard carries out a systematicattack on classical Marxism, claiming that Marxism is but a mirror ofbourgeois society, placing production at the center of life, thusnaturalizing the capitalist organization of society.

Although in the 1960s, Baudrillard participated in the tumultuousevents of May 1968, and was associated with the revolutionary Left andMarxism, he broke with Marxism in the early 1970s, but remainedpolitically radical though unaffiliated the rest of the decade. Likemany on the Left, Baudrillard was disappointed that the FrenchCommunist Party did not support the radical ‘60s movements and healso distrusted the official Marxism of theorists like Louis Althusserwho he found dogmatic and reductive. Consequently, Baudrillard began aradical critique of Marxism, one that would be repeated by many of hiscontemporaries who would also take a postmodern turn (see Best andKellner 1991 and 1997).

Baudrillard (1975) argues that Marxism, first, does not adequatelyilluminate premodern societies that were organized around religion,mythology, and tribal organization and not production. He also arguesthat Marxism does not provide a sufficiently radical critique ofcapitalist societies and alternative critical discourses andperspectives. At this stage, Baudrillard turns to anthropologicalperspectives on premodern societies for hints of more emancipatoryalternatives. Yet it is important to note that this critique of Marxismwas taken from the Left, arguing that Marxism did not provide a radicalenough critique of, or alternative to, contemporary capitalist andcommunist societies organized around production. Baudrillard concludedthat French communist failure to support the May 68 movements wasrooted in part in a conservatism that had roots in Marxism itself.Hence, Baudrillard and others of his generation began searching foralternative critical positions.

2. Symbolic Exchange and the Postmodern Break

The Mirror of Production and his next bookSymbolicExchange and Death (1976), a major text finally translated in1993, are attempts to provide ultraradical perspectives that overcomethe limitations of an economistic Marxist tradition that privileges theeconomic sphere. This ultra-leftist phase of Baudrillard’sitinerary would be short-lived, however, though inSymbolicExchange and Death, Baudrillard produces one of his most importantand dramatic provocations. The text opens with a Preface that condenseshis attempt to provide a significantly different approach to societyand culture. Building on the French cultural theory of GeorgesBataille, Marcel Mauss, and Alfred Jarry, he champions “symbolicexchange” which resists capitalist values of utility and monetaryprofit for cultural values. Baudrillard argues that in Bataille’sclaim that expenditure and excess is connected with sovereignty,Mauss’s descriptions of the social prestige of gift-giving inpremodern society, Jarry’s theater that ridicules French culture,and Saussure’s anagrams, there is a break with the values ofcapitalist exchange and production, or the production of meaning inlinguistic exchange. These cases of “symbolic exchange,”Baudrillard believes, break with the values of production and describepoetic exchange and creative cultural activity that providesalternatives to the capitalist values of production and exchange.

The term “symbolic exchange” was derived from GeorgesBataille’s notion of a “general economy” whereexpenditure, waste, sacrifice, and destruction were claimed to be morefundamental to human life than economies of production and utility(1988 [1967]). Bataille’s model was the sun that freely expendedits energy without asking anything in return. He argued that ifindividuals wanted to be truly sovereign (e.g., free from theimperatives of capitalism) they should pursue a “generaleconomy” of expenditure, giving, sacrifice, and destruction toescape determination by existing imperatives of utility.

For Bataille, human beings were beings ofexcess withexorbitant energy, fantasies, drives, needs, and heterogeneous desire.At this point, Baudrillard presupposes the truth of Bataille’santhropology and general economy. In a 1976 review of a volume ofBataille’sComplete Works, Baudrillard writes:“The central idea is that the economy which governs our societiesresults from a misappropriation of the fundamental human principle,which is a solar principle of expenditure” (1987: 57). In theearly 1970s, Baudrillard took over Bataille’s anthropologicalposition and what he calls Bataille’s “aristocraticcritique” of capitalism that he now claims is grounded in thecrass notions of utility and savings rather than the more sublime“aristocratic” notion of excess and expenditure. Batailleand Baudrillard presuppose here a contradiction between human natureand capitalism. They maintain that humans “by nature” gainpleasure from such things as expenditure, waste, festivities,sacrifices, and so on, in which they are sovereign and free to expendthe excesses of their energy (and thus to follow their “realnature”). The capitalist imperatives of labor, utility, andsavings by implication are “unnatural,” and go againsthuman nature.

Baudrillard argues that the Marxian critique of capitalism, bycontrast, merely attacks exchange value while exalting use value andthus utility and instrumental rationality, thereby “seeking agood use of the economy.” For Baudrillard:

Marxism is therefore only a limited petit bourgeois critique, onemore step in the banalization of life toward the ‘good use’of the social! Bataille, to the contrary, sweeps away all this slavedialectic from an aristocratic point of view, that of the masterstruggling with his death. One can accuse this perspective of beingpre- or post-Marxist. At any rate, Marxism is only the disenchantedhorizon of capital — all that precedes or follows it is moreradical than it is (1987: 60).

This passage is highly revealing and marks Baudrillard’sswitch to an “aristocratic critique” of political economydeeply influenced by Bataille and Nietzsche. For Bataille andBaudrillard are presenting a version of Nietzsche’s aristocratic“master morality” where “superior” individualscreate their own values and their life articulates an excess, overflow,and intensification of creative and erotic energies. Nietzsche was amajor influence^[5]throughoutBaudrillard’s life and, especially in the last decades of hiswork, Nietzschean motifs, modes of thought, and writing practicesincreasingly informed his work. Baudrillard became increasingly radicaland “un-contemporary,” standing alone against currenttrends and fashions, in a fiercely individualistic mode of thought.Nietzschean categories like fate, reversal, uncertainty, and anaristocratic assault on conventional wisdom began to shape hiswritings, that often, a la Nietzsche, took the form of aphorisms orshort essays.

For some time, Baudrillard would continue to attack the bourgeoisie,capital, and political economy, but from a perspective which champions“aristocratic” expenditure and sumptuary, aesthetic andsymbolic values. The dark side of his switch in theoretical andpolitical allegiances is avalorization of (i.e., a giving orassigning of value to) sacrifice and death that informsSymbolicExchange and Death (in which sacrifice provides a giving thatsubverts bourgeois values of utility and self-preservation, an ideathat has sinister implications in an era of suicide bombings andterrorism).

On the whole, in his mid-1970s work, Baudrillard was extricatinghimself from the familiar Marxian universe of production and classstruggle into a quite different neo-aristocratic and metaphysicalworld-view. Baudrillard seems to assume at this point thatpre-capitalist societies were governed by forms of symbolic exchangesimilar to Bataille’s notion of a general economy. Influenced byMauss’ theory of the gift and countergift, Baudrillard claimedthat pre-capitalist societies were governed by laws of symbolicexchange rather than production and utility. Developing these ideas,Baudrillard sketched a fundamental dividing line in history betweensymbolic societies — i.e., societies fundamentally organizedaround premodern exchange — and productivist societies (i.e.,societies organized around production and commodity exchange). He thusrejects the Marxian philosophy of history which posits the primacy ofproduction in all societies and rejects the Marxian concept ofsocialism, arguing that it does not break radically enough withcapitalist productivism, offering itself merely as a more efficient andequitable organization of production rather than as a completelydifferent sort of society with a different values and forms of cultureand life.

Henceforth, Baudrillard would contrast — in one way or another— his ideal of symbolic exchange to the values of production,utility, and instrumental rationality that govern capitalist (andsocialist) societies. “Symbolic exchange” thus emerges asBaudrillard’s “revolutionary” alternative to thevalues and practices of capitalist society, and stands for a variety ofheterogeneous activities in his 1970s writings. For instance, he writesin theCritique: “The exchange of looks, the presentwhich comes and goes, are like the air people breathe in and out. Thisis the metabolism of exchange, prodigality, festival — and alsoof destruction (which returns to non-value what production has erected,valorized). In this domain, value isn’t even recognized”(1981: 207). He also describes his conception of symbolic exchange inThe Mirror of Production where he writes: “The symbolicsocial relation is the uninterrupted cycle of giving and receiving,which, in primitive exchange, includes the consumption of the‘surplus’ and deliberate anti-production” (1975:143). The term therefore refers to symbolic or cultural activitieswhich do not contribute to capitalist production and accumulation andwhich potentially constitute a “radical negation” ofproductivist society.

At this stage of his thought, Baudrillard stood in a Frenchtradition of extolling “primitive” or premodern cultureover the abstract rationalism and utilitarianism of modern society. Hisdefense of symbolic exchange over production and instrumentalrationality thus stands in the tradition of Rousseau’s defense ofthe “natural savage” over modern man, Durkheim’sposing mechanical solidarities of premodern societies against theabstract individualism and anomie of modern ones, Bataille’svalorization of expenditure of premodern societies, or Mauss’ orLevi-Strauss’ fascination with the richness of “primitivesocieties” or “the savage mind.” After deconstructingthe modern master thinkers and his own theoretical fathers (Marx,Freud, Saussure, and his French contemporaries) for missing therichness of symbolic exchange, Baudrillard continues to champion thesymbolic and radical forms of thought and writing in a quest that takeshim into ever more esoteric and exotic discourse.

Thus, against the organizing forms of modern thought and society,Baudrillard champions symbolic exchange as an alternative. Againstmodern demands to produce value and meaning, he calls for theirextermination and annihilation, providing as examples, Mauss’sgift-exchange, Saussure’s anagrams, and Freud’s concept ofthe death drive. In all of these instances, there is a rupture with theforms of exchange (of goods, meanings, and libidinal energies) and thusan escape from the forms of production, capitalism, rationality, andmeaning. Baudrillard’s paradoxical concept of symbolic exchangecan be explained as expression of a desire to liberate himself frommodern positions and to seek a revolutionary position outside of modernsociety. Against modern values, he advocates their annihilation andextermination.

In 1970s like Baudrillard posits another divide in history asradical as the rupture between premodern symbolic societies and modernones. In the mode of classical social theory, he systematicallydevelops distinctions between premodern societies organized aroundsymbolic exchange, modern societies organized around production, andpostmodern societies organized around “simulation” by whichhe means the cultural modes of representation that“simulate” reality as in television, computer cyberspace,and virtual reality. Baudrillard’s distinction between the modeof production and utility that organized modern societies and the modeof simulation that he believes is the organizing form of postmodernsocieties postulates a rupture between modern and postmodern societiesas great as the divide between modern and premodern ones. In theorizingthe epochal postmodern rupture with modernity, he declares the“end of political economy” and of an era in whichproduction was the organizing form of society. Following Marx, heargues that this modern epoch was the era of capitalism and thebourgeoisie, in which workers were exploited by capital and provided arevolutionary force of upheaval. Baudrillard, however, declared the endof political economy and thus the end of the Marxist problematic and ofmodernity itself:

The end of labor. The end of production. The end of politicaleconomy. The end of the signifier/signified dialectic which facilitatesthe accumulation of knowledge and of meaning, the linear syntagma ofcumulative discourse. And at the same time, the end simultaneously ofthe exchange value/use value dialectic which is the only thing thatmakes accumulation and social production possible. The end of lineardimension of discourse. The end of the linear dimension of thecommodity. The end of the classical era of the sign. The end of the eraof production (Baudrillard 1993a: 8).

The discourse of “the end” signifies his announcing apostmodern break or rupture in history. People are now, Baudrillardclaims, in a new era of simulation in which social reproduction(information processing, communication, and knowledge industries, andso on) replaces production as the organizing form of society. In thisera, labor is no longer a force of production but is itself a“onesign amongst many” (1993a: 10). Labor is notprimarily productive in this situation, but is a sign of one’ssocial position, way of life, and mode of servitude. Wages too bear norational relation to one’s work and what one produces but toone’s place within the system (1993a: 19ff.). But, crucially,political economy is no longer the foundation, the social determinant,or even a structural “reality” in which other phenomena canbe interpreted and explained (31ff.). Instead people live in the“hyperreality” of simulations in which images, spectacles,and the play of signs replace the concepts of production and classconflict as key constituents of contemporary societies.

From now on, capital and political economy disappear fromBaudrillard’s story, or return in radically new forms.Henceforth, signs and codes proliferate and produce other signs and newsign machines in ever-expanding and spiraling cycles. Technology thusreplaces capital in this story and semiurgy (interpreted by Baudrillardas proliferation of images, information, and signs) replacesproduction. His postmodern turn is thus connected to a form oftechnological determinism and a rejection of political economy as auseful explanatory principle — a move that many of his criticsreject (see Kellner 1989, Norris 1992, and the studies in Kellner1994).

Symbolic Exchange and Death and the succeeding studies inSimulation and Simulacra (1994 [1981]) articulate theprinciple of a fundamental rupture between modern and postmodernsocieties and mark Baudrillard’s departure from the problematicof modern social theory. For him, modern societies are organized aroundthe production and consumption of commodities, while postmodernsocieties are organized aroundsimulation and the play ofimages and signs, denoting a situation in which codes, models, andsigns are the organizing forms of a new social order wheresimulation rules.^[6]In the society ofsimulation, identities are constructed by the appropriation of images,and codes and models determine how individuals perceive themselves andrelate to other people. Economics, politics, social life, and cultureare all governed by the mode of simulation, whereby codes and modelsdetermine how goods are consumed and used, politics unfold, culture isproduced and consumed, and everyday life is lived.

Baudrillard’s postmodern world is also one in which previouslyimportant boundaries and distinctions — such as those betweensocial classes, genders, political leanings, and once autonomous realmsof society and culture — lose power. If modern societies, forclassical social theory, were characterized by differentiation, forBaudrillard, postmodern societies are characterized bydedifferentiation, the “collapse” of (the power of)distinctions, orimplosion. In his society of simulation, therealms of economics, politics, culture, sexuality, and the social allimplode into each other. In this implosive mix, economics isfundamentally shaped by culture, politics, and other spheres, whileart, once a sphere of potential difference and opposition, is absorbedinto the economic and political, while sexuality is everywhere. In thissituation, differences between individuals and groups implode in arapidly mutating or changing dissolution of the social and the previousboundaries and structures upon which social theory had oncefocused.

In addition, his postmodern universe is one ofhyperrealityin which entertainment, information, and communication technologiesprovide experiences more intense and involving than the scenes of banaleveryday life, as well as the codes and models that structure everydaylife. The realm of the hyperreal (e.g., media simulations of reality,Disneyland and amusement parks, malls and consumer fantasylands, TVsports, virtual reality games, social networking sites, and otherexcursions into ideal worlds) is more real than real, whereby themodels, images, and codes of the hyperreal come to control thought andbehavior. Yet determination itself is aleatory in a non-linear worldwhere it is impossible to chart causal mechanisms in a situation inwhich individuals are confronted with an overwhelming flux of images,codes, and models, any of which may shape an individual’s thoughtor behavior.

In this postmodern world, individuals flee from the “desert ofthe real” for the ecstasies of hyperreality and the new realm ofcomputer, media, and technological experience. In this universe,subjectivities are fragmented and lost, and a new terrain of experienceappears that for Baudrillard renders previous social theories andpolitics obsolete and irrelevant. Tracing the vicissitudes of thesubject in present-day society, Baudrillard claims that contemporarysubjects are no longer afflicted with modern pathologies like hysteriaor paranoia. Rather, they exist in “a state of terror which ischaracteristic of the schizophrenic, an over-proximity of all things, afoul promiscuity of all things which beleaguer and penetrate him,meeting with no resistance, and no halo, no aura, not even the aura ofhis own body protects him. In spite of himself the schizophrenic isopen to everything and lives in the most extreme confusion”(1988: 27). For Baudrillard, the “ecstasy of communication”means that the subject is in close proximity to instantaneous imagesand information, in an overexposed and transparent world. In thissituation, the subject “becomes a pure screen a pure absorptionand re-absorption surface of the influent networks” (1988: 27).In other words, an individual in a postmodern world becomes merely anentity influenced by media, technological experience, and thehyperreal.

Thus, Baudrillard’s categories of simulation, implosion, andhyperreality combine to create an emergent postmodern condition thatrequires entirely new modes of theory and politics to chart and respondto the novelties of the contemporary era. His style and writingstrategies are also implosive (i.e., working against previouslyimportant distinctions), combining material from strikingly differentfields, studded with examples from the mass media and popular culturein an innovative mode of postmodern theory that does not respectdisciplinary boundaries. His writing attempts to itself simulate thenew conditions, capturing its novelties through inventive use oflanguage and theory. Such radical questioning of contemporary theoryand the need for new theoretical strategies are thus legitimated forBaudrillard by the large extent of changes in the current era.

For instance, Baudrillard claims that modernity operates with a modeof representation in which ideas represent reality and truth, conceptsthat are key postulates of modern theory. A postmodern society explodesthis epistemology by creating a situation in which subjects losecontact with the real and fragment and dissolve. This situationportends the end of modern theory that operated with a subject-objectdialectic in which the subject was supposed to represent and controlthe object. In the story of modern philosophy, the philosophic subjectattempts to discern the nature of reality, to secure groundedknowledge, and to apply this knowledge to control and dominate theobject (e.g., nature, other people, ideas, and so on). Baudrillardfollows here the poststructuralist critique that thought and discoursecould no longer be securely anchored in a priori or privilegedstructures of “the real.” Reacting against the mode ofrepresentation in modern theory, French thought, especially somedeconstructionists (Rorty’s “strong textualists”),moved into the play of textuality, of discourse, which allegedlyreferred only to other texts or discourses in which “thereal” or an “outside” were banished to the realm ofnostalgia.

In a similar fashion, Baudrillard, a “strongsimulacrist,” claims that in the media and consumer society,people are caught up in the play of images, spectacles, and simulacra,that have less and less relationship to an outside, to an external“reality,” to such an extent that the very concepts of thesocial, political, or even “reality” no longer seem to haveany meaning. And the narcoticized and mesmerized (some ofBaudrillard’s metaphors) media-saturated consciousness is in sucha state of fascination with image and spectacle that the concept ofmeaning itself (which depends on stable boundaries, fixed structures,shared consensus) dissolves. In this alarming and novel postmodernsituation, the referent, the behind and the outside, along with depth,essence, and reality all disappear, and with their disappearance, thepossibility of all potential opposition vanishes as well. Assimulations proliferate, they come to refer only to themselves: acarnival of mirrors reflecting images projected from other mirrors ontothe omnipresent television and computer screen and the screen ofconsciousness, which in turn refers the image to its previousstorehouse of images also produced by simulatory mirrors. Caught up inthe universe of simulations, the “masses” are “bathedin a media massage” without messages or meaning, a mass age whereclasses disappear, and politics is dead, as are the grand dreams ofdisalienation, liberation, and revolution.

Baudrillard claims that henceforth the masses seek spectacle and notmeaning. They implode into a “silent majority,” signifying“the end of the social” (1983b). Baudrillard implies thatsocial theory loses its very object as meanings, classes, anddifference implode into a “black hole” ofnon-differentiation. Fixed distinctions between social groupings andideologies implode and concrete face-to-face social relations recede asindividuals disappear in worlds of simulation — media, computers,virtual reality itself. Social theory itself thus loses its object, thesocial, while radical politics loses its subject and agency.

Nonetheless, he claims, at this point in his trajectory (i.e., thelate 1970s and early 1980s) that refusal of meaning and participationby the masses is a form of resistance. Hovering between nostalgia andnihilism, Baudrillard at once exterminates modern ideas (e.g., thesubject, meaning, truth, reality, society, socialism, and emancipation)and affirms a mode of symbolic exchange which appears to manifest anostalgic desire to return to premodern cultural forms. This desperatesearch for a genuinely revolutionary alternative was abandoned,however, by the early 1980s. Henceforth, he develops yet more novelperspectives on the contemporary moment, vacillating between sketchingout alternative modes of thought and behavior and renouncing the questfor political and social change.

In a sense, there is a parodic inversion of historical materialismin Baudrillard. In place of Marx’s emphasis on political economyand the primacy of the economic, for Baudrillard it is the model, thesuperstructure, that generates the real in a situation he refers to asthe “end of political economy” (1993a). For Baudrillard,sign values predominate over use values and exchange values; themateriality of needs and commodity use-values to serve them disappearin Baudrillard’s semiological imaginary, in which signs takeprecedence over the real and reconstruct human life. Turning theMarxist categories against themselves, masses absorb classes, thesubject of praxis is fractured, and objects come to rule human beings.Revolution is absorbed by the object of critique and technologicalimplosion replaces the socialist revolution in producing a rupture inhistory. For Baudrillard, in contrast to Marx, the catastrophe ofmodernity and eruption of postmodernity is produced by the unfolding oftechnological revolution. Consequently, Baudrillard replacesMarx’s hard economic and social determinism with its emphasis onthe economic dimension, class struggle, and human praxis, with a formof semiological idealism and technological determinism where signs andobjects come to dominate the subject.

Baudrillard thus concludes that the “catastrophe hashappened,” that the destruction of modernity and modern theorywhich he noted in the mid-1970s, has been completed by the developmentof capitalist society itself, that modernity has disappeared and a newsocial situation has taken its place. Against traditional strategies ofrebellion and revolution, Baudrillard begins to champion what he calls“fatal strategies” that push the values of the system tothe extreme in the hopes of collapse or reversal, and eventually adoptsa style of highly ironic metaphysical discourse that renouncesemancipation and the discourse and hopes of progressive socialtransformation.

3. From Pataphysics to Metaphysics and the Triumph of the Object

Baudrillard’s thought from the mid-1970s to his death in 2007challenges theories in a variety of disciplines. During the 1980s, hismajor works of the 1970s were translated into many languages and newbooks of the 1980s were in turn translated into English and other majorlanguages in short order. Consequently, he became world-renown as oneof the most influential thinkers of postmodernity. Baudrillard becamesomething of an academic celebrity, travelling around the worldpromoting his work and winning a significant following, though moreoutside of the field of academic theory than within his own disciplineof sociology.

At the same time that his work was becoming extremely popular,Baudrillard’s own writing became increasingly difficult andobscure. In 1979, he publishedSeduction (1990), a difficulttext that represented a major shift in his thought. The book marks aturning away from the more sociological discourse of his earlier worksto a more philosophical and literary discourse. Whereas inSymbolicExchange and Death (1993a [1976]), Baudrillard sketched outultra-revolutionary perspectives as a radical alternative, takingsymbolic exchange as his ideal, he now takes seduction as hisalternative to production and communicative interaction. Seduction,however, does not undermine, subvert, or transform existing socialrelations or institutions, but is a soft alternative, a play withappearances, and a game with feminism, a provocation that provoked asharp critical response.^[7]Baudrillard’s concept of seduction is idiosyncratic and involvesgames with signs which set up seduction as an aristocratic “orderof sign and ritual” in contrast to the bourgeois ideal ofproduction, while advocating artifice, appearance, play, and challengeagainst the deadly serious labor of production. He interprets seductionprimarily as a ritual and game with its own rules, charms, snares, andlures. His writing mutates at this point into a neo-aristocraticaestheticism dedicated to stylized modes of thought and writing, whichpresent a set of categories — reversibility, the challenge, theduel, — that move Baudrillard’s thought toward a form ofaristocratic aestheticism and metaphysics.

Baudrillard’s proliferating metaphysical speculations areevident inFatal Strategies (1983, translated in 1990),another turning point in his career. This text presented a bizarremetaphysical scenario concerning the triumph of objects over subjectswithin the “obscene” proliferation of an object world socompletely out of control that it surpasses all attempts to understand,conceptualize and control it. His scenario concerns the proliferationand growing supremacy of objects over subjects and the eventual triumphof the object. In a discussion of “Ecstasy and Inertia,”Baudrillard discusses how objects and events in contemporary societyare continually surpassing themselves, growing and expanding in power.The “ecstasy” of objects is their great proliferation andexpansion; ecstasy as going outside of or beyond oneself: the beautifulas more beautiful than beautiful in fashion, the real more real thanthe real in television, sex more sexual than sex in pornography.Ecstasy is thus the form of obscenity (fully explicit, nothing hidden)and of the hyperreality described by Baudrillard earlier taken toanother level, redoubled and intensified. His vision of contemporarysociety exhibits a careening of growth andexcrescence(croissance et excroissance), expanding and excreting evermore goods, services, information, messages or demands —surpassing all rational ends and boundaries in a spiral of uncontrolledgrowth and replication.

Yet growth, acceleration, and proliferation have reached suchextremes, Baudrillard suggests, that the ecstasy of excrescence (i.e.,increasing numbers of goods) is accompanied by inertia. The process ofgrowth presents a catastrophe for the subject, for not only does theacceleration and proliferation of the object world intensify thealeatory dimension of chance and non-determinacy, but the objectsthemselves come to dominate the exhausted subject, whose fascinationwith the play of objects turns to apathy, stupefaction, andinertia.

In retrospect, the growing power of the world of objects over thesubject has been Baudrillard’s theme from the beginning, thuspointing to an underlying continuity in his project. In his earlywritings, he explored the ways that commodities were fascinatingindividuals in the consumer society and the ways that the world ofgoods was assuming new and more value through the agency of sign valueand the code — which were part of the world of things, the systemof objects. His polemics against Marxism were fuelled by the beliefthat sign value and the code were more fundamental than suchtraditional elements of political economy as exchange value, use value,production and so on in constituting contemporary society. Then,reflections on the media entered the forefront of his thought: the TVobject was at the center of the home in Baudrillard’s earlierthinking and the media, simulations, hyperreality, and implosioneventually came to obliterate distinctions between private and public,inside and outside, media and reality. Henceforth, everything waspublic, transparent, and hyperreal in the object world that was gainingin fascination and seductiveness as the years went by.

InFatal Strategies and succeeding writings, the objectdominates or “defeats” the subject. The “fatalstrategies” suggest that individuals should simply submit to thestrategies and ruses of objects. In “banal strategies,”“the subject believes itself to always be more clever than theobject, whereas in the other [fatal strategies] the object is alwayssupposed to be more shrewd, more cynical, more brilliant than thesubject” (1983: 259–260). Previously, in banal strategies, thesubject believed itself to be more masterful and sovereign than theobject. A fatal strategy, by contrast, recognizes the supremacy of theobject and therefore takes the side of the object and surrenders to itsstrategies, ruses and rules.

In these works, Baudrillard seems to be taking his theory into therealm of metaphysics, but it is a specific type of metaphysics deeplyinspired by the pataphysics developed by Alfred Jarry. For Jarry:

pataphysics is the science of the realm beyond metaphysics…It will study the laws which govern exceptions and will explain theuniverse supplementary to this one; or, less ambitiously, it willdescribe a universe which one can see — must see perhaps —instead of the traditional one…

Definition: pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, whichsymbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by theirvirtuality, to their lineaments (Jarry 1963: 131).

Like the universe in Jarry’sUbu Roi,TheGestures and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll (1969), and otherliterary texts — as well as in Jarry’s more theoreticalexplications of pataphysics — Baudrillard’s is a totallyabsurd universe where objects rule in mysterious ways, and people andevents are governed by absurd and ultimately unknowableinterconnections and predestination (The French playwright EugeneIonesco is another good source of entry to this universe). LikeJarry’s pataphysics, Baudrillard’s universe is ruled bysurprise, reversal, hallucination, blasphemy, obscenity, and a desireto shock and outrage.

Thus, in view of the growing supremacy of the object, Baudrillardwants us to abandon the subject and to side with the object.Pataphysics aside, it seems that Baudrillard is trying to end thephilosophy of subjectivity that has controlled French thought sinceDescartes by going over completely to the other side. Descartes’malin genie, his evil genius, was a ruse of the subject thattried to seduce him into accepting what was not clear and distinct, butover which he was ultimately able to prevail. Baudrillard’s“evil genius” is the object itself which is much worse thanthe merely epistemological deceptions of the subject faced by Descartesand which constitutes a fatal destiny that demands the end of thephilosophy of subjectivity. Henceforth, for Baudrillard, people live inthe era of the reign of the object.

4. Into the 1990s: From Immanent Reversal to Impossible Exchange

In the 1980s, Baudrillard posited an “immanentreversal,” a flip-flop or reversed direction of meaning andeffects, in which things turn into their opposite. Thus, according toBaudrillard, the society of production was passing over to simulationand seduction; the panoptic and repressive power theorized by Foucaultwas turning into a cynical and seductive power of the media andinformation society; the liberation championed in the 1960s had becomea form of voluntary servitude; sovereignty had passed from the side ofthe subject to the object; and revolution and emancipation had turnedinto their opposites, trapping individuals in an order of simulationand virtuality. Baudrillard’s concept of “immanentreversal” thus provides a perverse form of Horkheimer andAdorno’s “dialectic of Enlightenment” (1972 [1947]),where everything becomes its opposite. For Adorno and Horkheimer,within the transformations of organized and hi-tech capitalism, modesof Enlightenment become domination, culture becomes culture industry,democracy becomes a form of mass manipulation, and science andtechnology form a crucial part of an apparatus of socialdomination.

Baudrillard follows this concept of reversal and his paradoxical andnihilistic metaphysical vision into the 1990s and 2000s where histhought becomes ever more hermetic, fragmentary, and difficult. Duringthe decade, Baudrillard continued playing the role of academic andmedia superstar, traveling around the world lecturing and performing inintellectual events.

Retiring from the University of Nanterre in 1987, Baudrillardsubsequently functioned as an independent intellectual, dedicatinghimself to caustic reflections on our contemporary moment andphilosophical ruminations that cultivate his distinct and alwaysevolving theory. From June 1987 through May 1997, he publishedreflections on events and phenomena of the day in the Paris newspaperLiberation, a series of writings collected inScreenedOut (2002 [2000]) and providing access to a laboratory for ideaslater elaborated in his books.

During the 1990s and until his death, Baudrillard continued to writeshort journal entries and by 2007 had published five volumes of hisCool Memories. These texts combine reflections on his travelsand experiences with development of his (often recycled) ideas andperceptions. Baudrillard’s fragmentary diaries often providerevealing insights into his personal life and psychology, as well ascapturing experiences and scenes that generate or embody some of hisideas. While often repetitive, his “cool memory” bookletsprovide direct access to the man and his ideas, as well as validatinghim as a global intellectual superstar who travels around the earth andwhose every diary notation is worthy of publication and attention.

Baudrillard also produced reflections on contemporary issues likethe Gulf War, the September 11 terror attacks, that he saw as the onlyreal “event” of the past decades, globalization, the USinvasion of Iraq, and other occurrences of the day.^[8]Baudrillard also continued his metaphysicalspeculations in works such asThe Transparency of Evil (1993[1990]),The Illusion of the End (1994b [1992]),ThePerfect Crime (1996b [1995]),Impossible Exchange (2001[1999]),The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucicity Pact (2005),andThe Conspiracy of Art (2005). These texts continue hisexcursions into the metaphysics of the object and defeat of the subjectand ironical engagement with contemporary history and politics.Bringing together reflections that develop his ideas and/or comment oncontemporary events, these texts continue to postulate a break withinhistory in the space of a postmoderncoupure, thoughBaudrillard himself usually distances himself from other versions ofpostmodern theory.^[9]

Baudrillard’s retirement from a sociology faculty seemed to haveliberated his philosophical impulses and in addition to his diarycollections and occasional forays into engagement of issues of theday, Baudrillard turned out a series of increasingly philosophical anddensely theoretical texts. The post-1990 texts continue thefragmentary style and use of short essays, aphorisms, stories, andaperçus that Baudrillard began deploying in the 1980s and oftenrepeat some of the same ideas and stories. While the books develop thequasi-metaphysical perspectives of the 1980s, they also generate somenew ideas and positions. They are often entertaining, although theycan also be outrageous and scandalous. These writings can be read as acombination of cultivation of original theoretical perspectives alongwith continual commentary on current social conditions, accompanied bya running dialogue with Marxism, poststructuralist theory, and otherforms of contemporary thought. Yet after his fierce and focusedpolemics of the 1970s against competing models of thought,Baudrillard’s later dialogues with theory consist mostly ofoccasional asides and recycling of previous ideas, a retro-theory thatperhaps ironically illustrates his theses about the decline of theoryand politics in the contemporary moment.

InThe Transparency of Evil (1993), Baudrillard described asituation in which previously separate domains of the economy, art,politics, and sexuality, collapsed into each other. He claims that art,for instance, has penetrated all spheres of existence, whereby thedreams of the artistic avant-garde for art to inform life has beenrealized. Yet, in Baudrillard’s vision, with the realization ofart in everyday life, art itself as a separate and transcendentphenomenon has disappeared.

Baudrillard calls this situation “transaesthetics” whichhe relates to similar phenomena of “transpolitics,”“transsexuality,” and “transeconomics,” inwhich everything becomes political, sexual, and economic, so that thesedomains, like art, lose their specificity, their boundaries, and theirdistinctness. The result is a confused condition where there are nomore criteria of value, of judgement, or of taste, and the function ofthe normative thus collapses in a morass of indifference and inertia.And so, although Baudrillard sees art proliferating everywhere, andwrites inThe Transparency of Evil that “talk about Artis increasing even more rapidly” (p. 14), the power of art— of art as adventure, art as negation of reality, art asredeeming illusion, art as another dimension and so on — hasdisappeared. Art is everywhere but there “are no more fundamentalrules” to differentiate art from other objects and “no morecriteria of judgement or of pleasure” (p. 14). For Baudrillard,contemporary individuals are indifferent toward taste and manifest onlydistaste: “tastes are determinate no longer” (p. 72).

And yet as a proliferation of images, of form, of line, of color, ofdesign, art is more fundamental then ever to the contemporary socialorder: “our society has given rise to a general aestheticization:all forms of culture — not excluding anti-cultural ones —are promoted and all models of representation and anti-representationare taken on board” (p. 16). Thus Baudrillard concludes that:“It is often said that the West’s great undertaking is thecommercialization of the whole world, the hitching of the fate ofeverything to the fate of the commodity. That great undertaking willturn out rather to have been the aestheticization of the whole world— its cosmopolitan spectacularization, its transformation intoimages, its semiological organization” (p. 16).

In the postmodern media and consumer society, everything becomes animage, a sign, a spectacle, a transaesthetic object — just aseverything also becomes trans-economic, trans-political, andtrans-sexual. This “materialization of aesthetics”is accompanied by a desperate attempt to simulate art, to replicate andmix previous artistic forms and styles, and to produce ever more imagesand artistic objects. But this “dizzying eclecticism” offorms and pleasures produces a situation in which art is no longer artin classical or modernist senses but is merely image, artifact, object,simulation, or commodity (Baudrillard is aware of increasinglyexorbitant prices for art works, but takes this as evidence that arthas become something else in the orbital hyperspace of value, anecstasy of skyrocketing values in “a kind of space opera”[p. 19]).

Examples of the paradoxical and ironic style of Baudrillard’sphilosophical musings abound inThe Perfect Crime (1996b).Baudrillard claims that the negation of a transcendent reality in thecurrent media and technological society is a “perfectcrime” that involves the “destruction of the real.”In a world of appearance, image, and illusion, Baudrillard suggests,reality disappears although its traces continue to nourish an illusionof the real. Driven toward virtualization in a high-tech society, allthe imperfections of human life and the world are eliminated in virtualreality, but this is the elimination of reality itself, the PerfectCrime. This “post-critical” and “catastrophic”state of affairs render our previous conceptual world irrelevant,Baudrillard suggests, urging criticism to turn ironic and transform thedemise of the real into an art form.

Baudrillard has entered a world of thought far from academicphilosophy, one that puts in question traditional modes of thought anddiscourse. His search for new philosophical perspectives has won him aloyal global audience, but also criticism for his excessive irony, wordplay, and intellectual games. Yet his work stands as a provocation totraditional and contemporary philosophy that challenges thinkers toaddress old philosophical problems such as truth and reality in newways in the contemporary world.

Baudrillard continues this line of thought in his 1999 textImpossible Exchange (2001). In three parts containing a seriesof short essays, he first develops his concept of an “impossibleexchange” between concepts and the world, theory and reality, andsubject and object. He attacks philosophical attempts to capturereality, arguing for an incommensurability between concepts and theirobjects, systems of thought and the world. For Baudrillard, the latteralways elude capture by the former, thus philosophy is an“impossible exchange” in which it is impossible to graspthe truth of the world, to attain certainty, to establish a foundationfor philosophy, and/or produce a defensible philosophical system.

In retrospect, Baudrillard’s philosophical play with thesubject/object distinction, his abandonment of the subject, and goingover to the side of the object is a key aspect of his thought. Heidentifies this dichotomy with the duality of good and evil in whichthe cultivation of the subject and its domination of the object istaken as the good within Western thought, while the sovereignty andside of the object is interwoven with the principle of evil.Baudrillard’s thought is radically dualistic and he takes theside of the pole within a series of dichotomies of Western thought thathas generally been derided as inferior, such as siding with appearanceagainst reality, illusion over truth, evil over good, and woman overman. InThe Perfect Crime (1996b), Baudrillard has declaredthat reality has been destroyed and henceforth that people live in aworld of mere appearance. In this universe, certainty and truth areimpossible and Baudrillard takes the side of illusion, arguing inImpossible Exchange (2001) that: “Illusion is thefundamental rule” (p. 6).

Baudrillard also argues that the world is without meaning and thataffirming meaninglessness is liberating: “If we could accept thismeaninglessness of the world, then we could play with forms,appearances and our impulses, without worrying about their ultimatedestination… As Cioran says, we are not failures until webelieve life has a meaning – and from that point on we arefailures, because it hasn’t” (2001: 128). Mostcontroversially, Baudrillard also identifies with the principle of evildefined as that which is opposed to and against the good. There is anadmittedly Manichean and Gnostic dimension to his thought, mixed withskepticism, cynicism and nihilism.^[10]Deconstruction, however, takes apart thesubject/object dichotomy indicating the impossibly of taking the sideof subject or object, or of good and evil as both are interconnectedwith each other and there can be no pure object without subject andvice versa, an argument Adorno has made.^[11]Baudrillard’s thought is intrinsicallydualistic and not dialectical. His thought is self-avowedly agonisticwith the duel presented in tandem with his dualism, taking on andattacking rival theories and positions. Contradictions do not botherBaudrillard, for indeed he affirms them. It is thus tricky to arguewith Baudrillard on strictly philosophical grounds and one needs tograsp his mode of writing, his notion of theory fictions (seeSection 5),and to engage their saliency and effects.

5. Theory Fictions: Baudrillard in the Contemporary Moment

Baudrillard develops what he terms “theory fiction,” orwhat he also calls “simulation theory” and“anticipatory theory.” Such “theory” intends tosimulate, grasp, and anticipate historical events, that he believes arecontinually outstripping all contemporary theory. The currentsituation, he claims, is more fantastic than the most fanciful sciencefiction, or theoretical projections of a futurist society. Thus, theorycan only attempt to grasp the present on the run and try to anticipatethe future. However, he has had a mixed record as a social andpolitical analyst and forecaster. As a political analyst, he has oftenbeen superficial and off the mark. In an essay “AnorexicRuins” published in 1989, he read the Berlin wall as a sign of afrozen history, of an anorexic history, in which nothing more canhappen, marked by a “lack of events” and the end ofhistory, taking the Berlin wall as a sign of a stasis between communismand capitalism. Shortly thereafter, rather significant events destroyedthe wall that Baudrillard took as permanent and opened up a newhistorical era.

The Cold War stalemate was long taken by Baudrillard as establishinga frozen history in which no significant change could take place.Already in his mid-1970s reflections, he presented the Vietnam war asan “alibi” to incorporate China, Russia, and eventuallyVietnam into a more rationalized and modernized world economic andpolitical order (Baudrillard 1983a: 66f), and in his book on the Gulfwar he repeats this claim (1995: 85), thus failing to see the actualpolitical stakes and reasons for the Vietnam war, as well as thesignificance of the struggles between capitalist andcommunist blocs.^[12]

For Baudrillard, the twin towers of the World Trade Center in NewYork also symbolized the frozen history and stasis between the twosystems of capitalism and communism. On the whole, he sees history asthe unfolding of expanding technological rationality turning into itsopposite, as the system incorporates ever more elements, producing animproved technological order, which then becomes irrational through itsexcesses, its illusions, and its generating unforeseen consequences.This mode of highly abstract analysis, however, occludes more specifichistorical determinants that would analyze how technologicalrationality is constructed and functioned and how and why it misfires.It also covers over the disorder and turmoil created by such things asthe crises and restructuring of global capitalism, the rise offundamentalism, ethnic conflict, and global terrorism which wereunleashed in part as a response to a globalized rationalization of themarket system and to the breakup of the bipolar world order.

Baudrillard’s reflections on the Gulf war take a similarposition, seeing it as an attempt of the New World Order to furtherrationalize the world, arguing that the Gulf war really served to bringIslam into the New World Order (1995: 19). The first study titled“The Gulf war will not take place” was initially publisheda few days before the actual outbreak of military hostilities andrepeats his earlier concept of “weak events” and frozenhistory. Baudrillard to the contrary, the Gulf war took place, but thisdid not deter him from publishing studies claiming during the episodethat it was not “really taking place” and after the warasserting that it “did not take place” — arguing thatit was a media spectacle and not a genuine war. Baudrillard does nothelp us to understand much about the event and does not even help us tograsp the role of the media in contemporary political spectacles.Reducing complex events like wars to categories like simulation orhyperreality illuminates the virtual and high-tech dimension to mediaevents, but erases all their concrete determinants. And yetBaudrillardian postmodern categories help grasp some of the dynamics ofthe culture of living in media and computer worlds where people seem toenjoy immersing themselves in simulated events (witness the fascinationof the Gulf war in 1991, the O.J. Simpson trials during 1994–6, theClinton sex scandals, and various other media spectacles throughout the1990s, and the September 11 terror attacks in the early days of thethird millennium).^[13]

InThe End of the Illusion (1994b), Baudrillard attackshead-on what he sees as current illusions of history, politics, andmetaphysics, and gamely tries to explain away his own politicalmisprognoses that contemporary history appeared in a frozen, glacialstate, stalemated between East and West, that the system of deterrencehad congealed, making sure that nothing dramatic could henceforthhappen, that the Gulf war couldn’t take place, and that the endof history had occurred. Baudrillard unleashes his full bag ofrhetorical tricks and philosophical analysis to attempt to maintainthese hypotheses in the face of the dramatic events of 1989–1991, whichhe claims are in fact “weak events,” that events are stillon strike, that history has indeed disappeared.^[14]He continues to argue that modernity as ahistorical epoch is over, with its political conflicts and upheavals,its innovations and revolutions, its autonomous and creative subject,and its myths of progress, democracy, Enlightenment, and the like.These myths, these strong ideas, are exhausted, he claims, andhenceforth a postmodern era of banal eclecticism, inertial implosion,and eternal recycling of the same become defining features.

For Baudrillard by the end of the 1990s with the collapse ofcommunism, the era of the strong ideas, of a conflicted world ofrevolution and universal emancipation, is over. Communism, on hisreading, collapsed of its own inertia, it self-destructed from within,it imploded, rather than perishing in ideological battle or militarywarfare. With the absorption of its dissidents into power, there is nolonger a clash of strong ideas, of opposition and resistance, ofcritical transcendence. With the embedding of the former communistregimes into the system of the capitalist world market and liberaldemocracy, the West no longer has an Other to battle against, there isno longer any creative or ideological tension, no longer any globalalternative to the Western world.

Baudrillard celebrated the coming of the new millennium with arecycling of some his old ideas on cloning, the end of history, and thedisappearance of the real in a series of lectures collected asTheVital Illusion (2000). For Baudrillard (2000), cloning isconnected to the fantasy of immortality, to defeating the life-cycle.Thus, it is no surprise that cryogenics — the freezing of deadhuman beings in the hope they might be regenerated in the futurethrough medical advances — is a booming global industry.Likewise, in a digital era, he claims that history has come to an endand reality has been killed by virtualization, as the human speciesprepares itself for a virtual existence. Baudrillard complained thatthe contemporary era was one of weak events, that no major historicaloccurrences had happened, and that therefore life and thought werebecoming increasingly boring.

Shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Baudrillard wrotea paper “L’esprit du terrorisme” published November2, 2001, inLe Monde. He argued that the assaults on the WorldTrade Center and Pentagon constituted a “strong event,”that the attacks were “the ultimate event, the mother of allevents, the pure event uniting within itself all the events that havenever taken place.” The “event strike,” Baudrillarddeclared, was over and since this time he has continued to focusintensely on the dynamics and happenings of contemporary history.

Hence, Baudrillard’s thought was reignited by 9/11 and thesubsequent Terror War which demonstrate the continuing relevance ofsome of his key categories and that produced some of his mostprovocative later work. He had long written on terrorism and wasfocusing reflection on globalization when the 9/11 attacks occurred. Hequickly responded with theLe Monde article, soon aftertranslated and expanded into one of the more challenging andcontroversial books on the terror spectacle,The Spirit ofTerrorism: And Requiem for the Twin Towers (2002a). ForBaudrillard, the 9/11 attacks represent a new kind of terrorism,exhibiting a “form of action which plays the game, and lays holdof the rules of the game, solely with the aim of disrupting it…they have taken over all the weapons of the dominantpower”. That is, the terrorists in Baudrillard’sreading used airplanes, computer networks, and the media associatedwith Western societies to produce a spectacle of terror. The attacksevoked a global specter of terror that the very system of globalizationand Western capitalism and culture were under assault by “thespirit of terrorism” and potential terrorist attacks anytime andanywhere.

For Baudrillard, “the speeches and commentaries made sinceSeptember 11 betray a gigantic post-traumatic abreaction both to theevent itself and to the fascination that it exerts. The moralcondemnation and the sacred union against terrorism are directlyproportional to the prodigious jubilation felt at having seen thisglobal superpower destroyed.” Baudrillard perceived that theterrorists hope that the system will overreact in response to themultiple challenges of terrorism: “It is the terrorist model tobring about an excess of reality, and have the system collapse beneaththat excess”.

In Baudrillard’s view, the 9/11 attacks represented “theclash of triumphant globalization at war with itself” andunfolded a “fourth world war”: “The first put an endto European supremacy and to the era of colonialism; the second put anend to Nazism; and the third to Communism. Each one brought usprogressively closer to the single world order of today, which is nownearing its end, everywhere opposed, everywhere grappling with hostileforces. This is a war of fractal complexity, waged worldwide againstrebellious singularities that, in the manner of antibodies, mount aresistance in every cell.” (Sokal and Bricmont (1998) havecriticized Baudrillard for such metaphoric use of scientificterminology.)

Upon the initial publication of his response in French newspapersand its immediate translation into English and other languages,Baudrillard himself was accused of justifying terrorism when he statedin the article inLe Monde: “Because it was thisinsufferable superpower [i.e., the US] that gave rise both to theviolence now spreading throughout the world and to the terroristimagination that (without our knowing it) dwells within us all. Thatthe entire world without exception had dreamed of this event, thatnobody could help but dream of the destruction of so powerful a Hegemon— this fact is unacceptable to the moral conscience of the West.And yet it’s a fact nevertheless, a fact that resists theemotional violence of all the rhetoric conspiring to cover it up. Inthe end, it was they who did it, but we who wished it.”^[15]

Baudrillard defended himself from accusations that such reflectionsconstituted a virulent anti-Americanism or legitimation of terrorism,claiming: “I do not praise murderous attacks — that wouldbe idiotic. Terrorism is not a contemporary form of revolution againstoppression and capitalism. No ideology, no struggle for an objective,not even Islamic fundamentalism, can explain it. …I haveglorified nothing, accused nobody, justified nothing. One should notconfuse the messenger with his message. I have endeavored to analyzethe process through which the unbounded expansion of globalizationcreates the conditions for its own destruction”.^[16]

Indeed, Baudrillard has also produced some provocative reflectionson globalization. In “The Violence of the Global,” hedistinguishes between the global and the universal, linkingglobalization with technology, the market, tourism, and informationcontrasted to identification of the universal with “human rights,liberty, culture, and democracy.”^[17]While “globalization appears to beirreversible, … universalization is likely to be on its wayout.” Elsewhere, Baudrillard writes: “…the idea offreedom, a new and recent idea, is already fading from the minds andmores, and liberal globalization is coming about in precisely theopposite form — a police-state globalization, a total control, aterror based on ‘law-and-order’ measures. Deregulation endsup in a maximum of constraints and restrictions, akin to those of afundamentalist society.”^[18]

Many see globalization as a matrix of market economy, democracy,technology, migration and tourism, and the worldwide circulation ofideas and culture. Baudrillard, curiously, takes the position of thosein the anti-globalization movement who condemn globalization as theopposite of democracy and human rights. For him, globalization isfundamentally a process of homogenization and standardization thatcrushes “the singular” and heterogeneity. This position,however, fails to note the contradictions that globalizationsimultaneously produces homogenization and hybridization anddifference, and that the anti-corporate globalization movement isfighting for social justice, democratization, and increased rights,factors that Baudrillard links with a dying universalization. In fact,the struggle for rights and justice is an important part ofglobalization and Baudrillard’s presenting of human rights,democratization, and justice as part of an obsolete universalizationbeing erased by globalization is theoretically andpolitically problematical.^[19]

Before 9/11, Baudrillard saw globalization and technologicaldevelopment producing standardization and virtualization that waserasing individuality, social struggle, critique and reality itself asmore and more people became absorbed in the hyper and virtual realitiesof media and cyberspace and virtual culture. This disappearance ofreality constituted the “perfect crime” which is thesubject of a book of that title (1996b) and elaborated inThe VitalIllusion (2000). Baudrillard presents himself here as a detectivesearching for the perpetrator of the “perfect crime,” themurder of reality, “the most important event of modernhistory.” His recurrent theme is the destruction anddisappearance of the real in the realm of information and simulacra,and the subsequent reign of illusion and appearance. In a Nietzscheanmode, he suggests that henceforth truth and reality are illusions, thatillusions reign, and that therefore people should respect illusion andappearance and give up the illusory quest for truth and reality.

Yet in the 9/11 attacks and subsequent Terror War, difference andconflict have erupted upon the global stage and heterogeneous forcesthat global capitalism appears unable to absorb and assimilate haveemerged that have produced what appears to be an era of intenseconflict. Ideological apologists of globalization such as ThomasFriedman have been forced to acknowledge that globalization has itsdark sides and produces conflict as well as networking, interrelations,and progress. It remains to be seen, of course, how the current TerrorWar and intensified global conflicts will be resolved.

6. Concluding Assessment

Baudrillard has never been as influential in France as in theEnglish-speaking world and elsewhere – a point made in manyFrench obituaries upon his death. He is an example of the“global popular,” a thinker who hasfollowers and readers throughout the world, though, so far, noBaudrillardian school has emerged.^[20]Baudrillard’s influence has been largely atthe margins of a diverse number of disciplines ranging from socialtheory to philosophy to art history, thus it is difficult to gauge hisimpact on philosophy or the mainstream of any specific academicdiscipline.

Baudrillard is perhaps most important as part of the postmodern turnagainst modern society and its academic disciplines. His work cutsacross the disciplines and promotes cross-disciplinary thought. Hechallenges standard wisdom and puts in question received dogma andmethods. While his early work on the consumer society, the politicaleconomy of the sign, simulation and simulacra, and the implosion ofphenomena previously separated can be deployed within criticalphilosophy and social theory, much of his post-1980s work quiteself-consciously goes beyond the classical tradition and in mostinterviews of the past decade Baudrillard distances himself fromcritical philosophy and social theory, claiming that the energy ofcritique has dissipated.

Baudrillard thus emerges in retrospect as a transdisciplinarytheorist of the end of modernity who produces sign-posts to the new eraof postmodernity and is an important, albeit hardly trustworthy, guideto the new era. One can read Baudrillard’s post-1970s work asscience fiction that anticipates the future by exaggerating presenttendencies, and thus provides early warnings about what might happen ifpresent trends continue (Kellner 1995). It is not an accident thatBaudrillard is an aficionado of science fiction, who has himselfinfluenced a large number of contemporary science fiction writers andfilmmakers of the contemporary era, includingThe Matrix(1999) where his work is cited.^[21]

However, in view of his exaggeration of the alleged break withmodernity, it is ambiguous whether Baudrillard’s last two decadesof work is best read as science fiction or theory. He obviously wantsto have it both ways with social theorists thinking that he providessalient perspectives on contemporary social realities, that Baudrillardreveals what is really happening, that he tells it like it is. And yetmore cynical anti-sociologists are encouraged to enjoyBaudrillard’s fictions, his experimental discourse, his games,and play. Likewise, he sometimes encourages cultural metaphysicians toread his work as serious reflections on the realities of our time,while winking a pataphysical aside at those skeptical of suchundertakings. And Baudrillard’s philosophical writings provokephilosophers to defend their positions against his and to rethinkcertain traditional questions in the light of contemporaryrealities.

Thus, it is difficult to decide whether Baudrillard is best read asscience fiction and pataphysics, or as philosophy, social theory, andcultural metaphysics, and whether his post-1970s work should be readunder the sign of truth or fiction. In retrospect, Baudrillard’searly critical explorations of the system of objects and consumersociety contain some of his most important contributions tocontemporary social theory. His mid-1970s analysis of a dramaticmutation occurring within contemporary societies and rise of a new modeof simulation, which sketched out the effects of media and informationon society as a whole, is also original and important. But at thisstage of his work, Baudrillard falls prey to a technologicaldeterminism and semiological idealism which posits an autonomoustechnology and play of signs generating a society of simulation whichcreates a postmodern break and the proliferation of signs, spectacles,and simulacra. Baudrillard erases autonomous and differentiated spheresof the economy, polity, society, and culture posited by classicalsocial theory in favor of an implosive theory that also crossesdisciplinary boundaries, thus mixing philosophy and social theory intoa broader form of social diagnosis and philosophical play.

In the final analysis, Baudrillard is perhaps more useful as aprovocateur who challenges and puts in question the tradition ofclassical philosophy and social theory than as someone who providesconcepts and methods that can be applied in philosophical, social orcultural analysis. He claims that the object of classical social theory— modernity — has been surpassed by a new postmodernity andthat therefore alternative theoretical strategies, modes of writing,and forms of theory are necessary. While his work on simulation and thepostmodern break from the mid-1970s into the 1980s provides aparadigmatic postmodern theory and analysis of postmodernity that hasbeen highly influential, and that despite its exaggerations continuesto be of use in interpreting present social trends, his later work isarguably of more literary interest. Baudrillard thus ultimately goesbeyond philosophy and classical social theory altogether into a newsphere and mode of writing that provides occasional biting criticalinsights into contemporary social phenomena and provocative critiquesof contemporary and classical philosophy and social theory. He nowappears, in retrospect, as a completely idiosyncratic thinker who wenthis own way and developed his own mode of writing and thought that willcontinue to provoke contemporary and future students of philosophy andcritical theory.

Bibliography

Primary Literature

Major Theoretical Works by Baudrillard:

1968 [1996c],The System of Objects, London: Verso.
1970 [1998],The Consumer Society, Paris: Gallimard.
1973 [1975],The Mirror of Production, St. Louis: TelosPress.
1973 [1981],For a Critique of the Political Economy of theSign, St. Louis: Telos Press.
1983a,Simulations, New York: Semiotext(e).
1983b,In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, New York:Semiotext(e).
1983c, “The Ecstacy of Communication,” inTheAnti-Aesthetic, Hal Foster (ed.), Washington: Bay Press.
1987, “When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical Principle ofEconomy,” D.J. Miller (trans.),Canadian Journal of Politicaland Social Theory, 11: 57–62.
1988,America, London: Verso.
1990a,Cool Memories, London: Verso.
1990b,Fatal Strategies, New York: Semiotext(e).
1993a,Symbolic Exchange and Death, London: Sage.
1993b,The Transparency of Evil, London: Verso.
1994a,Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor: The Universityof Michigan Press.
1994b,The Illusion of the End, Oxford: Polity Press.
1995,The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, P. Patton (trans.),Sydney: Power Publications, and Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress.
1996a,Cool Memories II, Oxford: Polity Press.
1996b,The Perfect Crime, London and New York: VersoBooks.
1997,Fragments: Cool Memories III, 1990–1995, London andNew York: Verso Books.
2000,The Vital Illusion, New York: Columbia UniversityPress.
2001,Impossible Exchange, London: Verso.
2002a,The Spirit of Terrorism: And Requiem for the TwinTowers, London: Verso.
2002b,Screened Out, London: Verso.
2005a,The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucicity Pact.London: Verson.
2005b,The Conspiracy of Art. New York: Semiotext(e).
2006a,Utopia Deferred. Writing from Utopie (1967–1978).New York: Semiotext(e).
2006b, “The Pyres of Autumn”,New Left Review II (37), Jan/Feb. [Baudrillard 2006b available online].
2010, The Agony of Power.Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 6. Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e).
2015,Jean Baudrillard: From Hyperreality to Disappearance:Uncollected Interviews, Richard G. Smith, and David B. Clarke,eds., Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.
2017,Jean Baudrillard: The Disappearance of Culture:Uncollected Interviews, Richard G. Smith, and David B. Clarke,eds., Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.

Secondary Literature

Best, Steven, and Kellner, Douglas, 1991,Postmodern Theory:Critical Interrogations, London and New York: MacMillan andGuilford Press.
–––, 1997,The Postmodern Turn, NewYork: Guilford Press.
–––, 2001,The Postmodern Adventure, NewYork: Guilford Press.
Bishop, Ryan (ed.), 2009,Baudrillard Now: Current Perspectivesin Baudrillard Studies. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Butler, Rex, 1999,Jean Baudrillard: The Defense of theReal, London and Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Clarke, D.B., Doel, M.A., Merrin, William, and Smith, R.G. (eds),2009,Jean Baudrillard. Fatal Theories. London and New York:Routledge.
Debord, Guy, 1970,The Society of the Spectacle, Detroit:Black and Red.
Frankovits, Alan, 1984, editorSeduced and Abandoned: TheBaudrillard Scene, Glebe, New South Wales: Stonemoss.
Gane, Mike, 1991,Baudrillard. Critical and Fatal Theory,London: Routledge.
–––, 2000,Jean Baudrillard: In RadicalUncertainty. London: Pluto Press.
––– (ed.), 1993,BaudrillardLive. Selected Interviews, London: Routledge.
Genosko, Gary, 1994,Baudrillard and Signs, London:Routledge.
Grace, V., 2000,Baudrillard’s Challenge: A FeministReading, London: Routledge.
Jarry, Alfred, 1963, “What is Pataphysics?,”Evergreen Review, 13: 131–151.
–––, 1969,The Ubu Plays, New York:Grove press.
Kellner, Douglas, 1989a,Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism toPostmodernism and Beyond, Cambridge and Palo Alto: Polity Pressand Stanford University Press.
–––, 1989b,Critical Theory, Marxism, andModernity, Cambridge, UK and Baltimore, MD: Polity Press and JohnHopkins University Press, 1989.
––– (ed.), 1994,Jean Baudrillard. A CriticalReader, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
–––, 1995,Media Culture. Cultural Studies,Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern,London and New York: Routledge.
–––, 2003a,Media Spectacle, London andNew York: Routledge.
–––, 2003b,From September 11 to Terror War:The Dangers of the Bush Legacy, Lanham, Md.: Rowman andLittlefield.
Lefebvre, Henri, 1971 [1968],Everyday Life in the ModernWorld, New Brunswick: Transaction Books.
–––, 1991 [1947; 1958],Critique of EverydayLife, London: Verso.
Norris, Christopher, 1998Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism,Intellectuals and the Gulf War. Amhearst: Univ of MassachusettsPress.
Rokek, Chris and Bryan Turner, 1993, editorsForgetBaudrillard, London: Routledge.
Smith, Jonathan, 2004, “The Gnostic Baudrillard: A Philosophyof Terrorism Seeking Pure Appearance,” inInternationalJournal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 1/No. 1 (January).
Sokal, A. and J. Bricmont, 1998, “Jean Baudrillard” inFashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse ofScience, New York: Picador, pp. 147–153.
Stearns, William and William Chaloupka (eds.), 1992,TheDisappearence of Art and Politics, New York and London: SaintMartins and Macmillan Press.
Woodward, Ashley, 2009,Nihilism in postmodernity: Lyotard,Baudrillard, Vattimo, Aurora, Colo,: Davies Group,Publishers.

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Other Internet Resources

Goldblatt, M., 2001,Americawanted Sept. 11.,French Toast column,National Review Online, (December 13, 2001).
Kellner, Douglas, 2005,“Baudrillard, Globalization and Terrorism: Some Comments on Recent Adventures of the Image and Spectacle on the Occasion of Baudrillard’s 75th Birthday,” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 2, Number 1.
Jean Baudrillard Bibliography,maintained at the European Graduate School.
Postmodern Theory,maintained by Douglas Kellner (UCLA).
Situationist International,maintained by A.H.S. Boy.

Acknowledgments

For critical commentary that helped with the revision of this entry,I am grateful to Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman.

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