jean baudrillard. who is jean baudrillard? works of jean baudrillard. life of postmodern philosopher jean baudrillard.
Jean Baudrillard is considered one of the greatest philosophers of the postmodern era. His critical and challenging ideas outside the dominant or widespread traditional patterns of explanation in many different fields, his much-discussed remarks on the Gulf War, his evaluations around concepts such as simulation, hyperreality and implosion, the increasing impact of new communication, information and media technologies and his evaluations on consumption. Especially the impact of mass media today and his provocative ideas on consumption have been influential in his acceptance as one of the most important intellectuals in a period when an era is ending and a new era is entering.
Little is known about Baudrillard’s life until he was recognized as a thinker. He was born on July 27, 1929 in Reims, an industrial city in France, the only child of a farming family. In interviews, he said that his grandparents were peasants and his parents were civil servants. His family and his environment were people who had migrated from the countryside to the city and had no intellectual concerns; in fact, Baudrillard saw this as a deficiency and he was the first person in his family to study at university, “I was, so to speak, the first member of the tribe to read something.”
Baudrillard, who started his secondary education at Reims High School with his family, started to prepare for university by studying intensively at Henri IV High School. Since his high school years, Baudrillard felt obliged to learn German within the framework of the tense and contradictory relationship between France and Germany brought about by the political conjuncture of the period, and he completed his university education at Sorbonne University by studying German.
After completing his university education, he taught German in various high schools for 10 years. During this time, he had the chance to read the works of German philosophers in depth; he read the texts of names such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and was greatly influenced by Nietzsche because of his method and critical style. In the same period, he also reads the works of Rimbaud, Artaud and Bataille, focuses on poetic text and translates them into French.
In 1956, he began working as a professor of secondary education at a French Lyceé, and in the early 1960s did editorial work for the French publisher Seuil. In 1962-1963, Baudrillard worked with Peter Weiss, who published articles on literature in the magazine Modern Times (Les Temps Modernes), and a specialist in German language and literature who translated into French the works of Bertolt Brecht and Wilhelm Mühlmann’s book on messianic revolutionary movements. During this period, he became acquainted with the works of Henri Lefebvre, who influenced him with his criticism of everyday life, and Roland Barthes, whose semiological analysis of contemporary society left a deep impression on him.
Baudrillard entered the University of Paris Nanterne in 1966. While researching languages, philosophy, sociology and other disciplines, he becomes an assistant to Henri Lefebvre. In 1966, he defends his doctoral thesis, Le système des objects (The System of Objects), in the Department of Sociology at Naterre and starts teaching sociology that year.
In the 1960s, he became involved with the French left, opposing French and US intervention in the Algerian and Vietnam wars. These were the years when the student unrest at Narrante University was extremely chaotic and tense. Baudrillard also crystallized his side in this tension by writing for the magazine Utopie in 1966-67. As Baudrillard would later say, his writings in this magazine laid the foundations of his break with Marxism. Nanterre was at the center of radical politics and the “March 22nd Movement” linked to Daniel Cohn-Bendit and the enragés was organized at Nanterre Sociology. Baudrillard would later say that he participated in the events of May 1968, which resulted in mass student uprisings and a general strike that almost ousted Gaulle from power.
Between 1960 and 1969, Baudrillard also translated from German into French a number of articles and works by Peter Weiss, Wilhelm E. Mülhmann, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
After completing his doctoral dissertation, Baudrillard continued to work on objects and sign systems during his years as an assistant at the university and published his first book, The Society of Consumption (Le Societe de Consommation) in 1970, taking the arguments he had put forward in his doctoral thesis further.
This work was followed by The Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign in 1972, and The Mirror of Production in 1973, which is important in that it was Baudrillard’s first work to be translated into English. In 1975, he published Symbolic Exchange and Death. After these works, Baudrillard’s name began to be mentioned as a social theorist, especially in French society.
The work that influenced Baudrillard the most, both negatively and positively, was his 1977 work Oubiler Foucault (Forgetting Foucault), in which he described Foucault, who had greatly influenced and outlined the world of thought in France at the time, as “a messiah whose discourse came after it was too late, a revolution that was attempted after it was too late, and whose narratives are now obsolete”.
Forgetting Foucault caused Baudrillard, who was at the peak of his fame and whose name was often involved in controversies before its publication, to be excommunicated by the academic institutions of France; in fact, the return of these target arrows did not stop with criticism; because of this book, Baudrillard could not get seniority in the academy; he could only receive a professorship title in 1990 from the university where he was a chief assistant for 20 years.
When everything is made visible, we find that there is nothing left worth seeing, according to Jean Baudrillard, who created one of the most stunning theories of consumption in history, his intellectual life is full of ruptures. In-depth examination of Baudrillard’s beliefs and justifications reveals the strong effect of the time and location he lived in. His intellectual environment is distinguished by political, economic, and economic identity in addition to philosophical and cultural influences.
The fact that Baudrillard is a name that is frequently used in both sociology and philosophy demonstrates that he is not only a philosopher who retreated to his ivory tower but also a man of action in the street, in action, in protest, or, to put it another way, a man of action who reveals a political vitality and takes risks.
Baudrillard’s influences in the world of thought can be discussed under four headings. First of all, his interest in the science of Pataphysics through his teacher Emmanuel Peillet from his high school days onwards formed the basis of topics such as the void of meaning, which he thought about in depth. Considering the influence of German thought on France later in his life, Baudrillard’s interest in German and his preference for the German language at university in the mid-twentieth century, when philosophical intertwining was frequent, constitutes the foundations of the second breaking point in his intellectual world.
The fact that he read Nietzsche in his mother tongue and was influenced by him both in terms of method and content is evident in Baudrillard’s ideas “specifically in the theory of society”. The Nietzschean signs in Baudrillard’s differently constructed nihilism and style, in his ironic and harsh language, are traces of Nietzsche’s influence on his life. Meeting Lefebvre opens the door to a political break in Baudrillard’s life; he meets and embraces Marxism. Finally, his meeting with Roland Barthes, Barthes’ semiological analyses and his calmness influenced Baudrillard, allowing him to move away from Marxism and to put forward his own cultural theory.
Key Concepts of Jean Baudrillard’s Philosophy:
1. Object: As a philosophical term, an object is something that is called by a name and to which some kind of reference is made or pointed to. Baudrillard, since the beginning, object has been the most important word for me. The reason why I prefer this point of view is to escape from the problematic of the subject.
The reason why my thought is always centered on the problem of the object is that I believe it offers an alternative option. This also has to do with the era we live in. In the 1960s, production lost its privileged position and the phenomenon of consumption brought objects to the forefront. What really interests Baudrillard is not how objects are manufactured or the objects themselves. He characterizes and symbolizes the transition from a subject-centered theory of knowledge to an object-centered theory of knowledge. The most important issue for Baudrillard is that objects create their own symbolic systems and codes, that objects refer to a virtual world. Objects establish an order among themselves and this order makes the subject, who thinks that he dominates objects, think that he has gained a “status” in society.
2. Evil: Baudrillard thinks that in a universe where reality exists, distinctions between real and fake, true and false, good and evil can be easily made. With the postmodern period, which is the period of negation of values, all areas of emancipation have caused a kind of shift in meaning. For example, the idea of progress, which was almost worshipped in the modern period, has disappeared with the postmodern period, but progress still continues.
While the body used to be the metaphor field of the soul, now the body has become the metastasis field of the soul. According to him, evil manifests itself mostly in value judgments, because in the postmodern period, when all values have evolved into a state of devaluation, people adopt whatever value is necessary for them. In his book on America, he writes that good and evil have always existed at the same time, but with the collapse of epistemological fields with the new era, minds think that evil or bad comes after good or good. Baudrillard goes a little further and wants to decode evil at this point and says that “the most difficult aspect of the idea of evil is to purify it from all notions of unhappiness and guilt”.
3. Reality: Baudrillard wants to clarify what these concepts mean in terms of postmodernism by renewing the concepts such as art, virtual, reality, illusion, simulation, etc., which have been discussed in the world of thought and on which corpuses have been accumulated. According to Baudrillard, who thinks that it is now very difficult to talk about absolute reality because there is nothing left to test and decide what is real and what is fake in a virtual world, the truth is lost in simulation.
What makes it impossible to purify the simulation order from reality is the existence of an order that cannot see anything other than reality, that cannot think anything other than reality, so to speak. The postmodern treatment of all inquiries into reality, the attempt to reach truth and reality by using postmodern tools, is itself a mode of concealment/simulation, and therefore the real purpose of simulations is to attack reality.
According to Baudrillard, the only way to exist in a world of reality overflowing with meaning is to deny such a world. Because meaning is no longer in the message nor in the messenger, meaning is nowhere. Moreover, the things that fascinated the world and us before the modern era no longer fascinate the world and things are now devoid of interpretation
Baudrillard’s “simulation theory” is one of the most important works that made him famous. According to Baudrillard, everything today consists of simulations and it is impossible to distinguish what is real and what is not. In this age of simulation we live in, there is no reality anymore and everything is upside down. Simulacrum is an appearance that is not real but wants to be perceived as reality and it is difficult to distinguish it.
Because we can understand that a situation that seems to be ‘as-if’ is not really so, but a simulated situation creates its own reality by reproducing reality, and it is very difficult to distinguish reality in such a situation.One of the most important issues in Baudrillard’s simulation theory is television. Because visual media stands out as the most powerful weapon in creating simulation. Reality has become a mere appearance and therefore it is mind-boggling. The system uses this to sustain itself and uses mass media to create this image.
Between 1977 and 1990, when Baudrillard stayed at the university as a chief assistant, he continued to write prolifically. In 1978, he wrote The Plaster Angel and his important work The Problem of the Social in the Shadow of the Silent Masses, in which he explained the place and situation of society in the theory of simulation that he would later put forward, and in 1979 he completed On Seduction.
Baudrillard’s 1981 work Simulacra and Simulation would be the work that would establish him as a postmodern theorist in the long run; Baudrillard also published Desperate Strategies in the same year, and these works of Baudrillard were not only limited to the Parisian circle, but also opened the doors of fame that spread to continental Europe by translating his works.
Retiring in 1990, Baudrillard’s already harsh style became even harsher after he left academia. After his retirement, Baudrillard began to travel frequently and wrote about his travels in “Cool Memories”, which he published in five separate books, as well as America, The Transparency of Evil, The Illusion of the End, Radical Thought and The Perfect Murder in the 1990s after his retirement. It was Baudrillard’s work “The Gulf War Did Not Happen”, in which he tried to show that the Gulf War between Iraq and Kuwait in 1990 did not actually happen, that made him a worldwide sensation.
This is his most sensational discourse and work in terms of contributing to his provocative critiques of world politics based on the concepts of virtual and hyper-real, i.e. his public intellectual identity.
Baudrillard, who did not stop writing articles and critiques until his death, continued his lectures at the European Graduate School despite his advanced age, and even participated in conferences he was invited to from various parts of the world, passed away on March 7, 2007 in France. Baudrillard was never as influential in France as he was in non-French speaking countries. This point was emphasized in the French commemorations of his death. Although he is an example of global popularity as a thinker with admirers and readers all over the world, no Baudrillardian school has emerged so far. Baudrillard’s influence has mostly been in very different disciplines, from social theory to philosophy and art. It is therefore difficult to measure his influence on the mainstream of philosophy or particular academic disciplines.
