Jean Baudrillard: Radical Disenchantment

Jean Baudrillard was a post-structuralist and post-modernist philosopher, sociologist, cultural theorist, photographer and political commentator. He was born on July 27, 1929 in the northern town of Reims. He was the first one to attend university in his family who went ahead to become a world-famous intellectual and a sociology professor.

Heavily influenced by Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille, Baudrillard was a thinker who reversed the thoughts of others to give an original analysis. Other influences on Baudrillard included the Surrealists, the Situationists, and authors such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Jean-Paul Sartre. Psychoanalysis and Sigmund Freud also had a key impact on Baudrillard’s philosophy. The strongest influence on him remains that of Marxism. His thought developed through three crucial stages, starting from post-Marxism, passing through socio-linguistic and reaching to a techno-prophetic shift.

Jean Baudrillard’s philosophy stands on the concepts of simulation and hyper-reality, which refers to the unrealistic nature of the modern culture. In today’s world of mass communication and consumption, all of our feelings and emotions are simulated through unnatural means. We remain unaware of reality as we do not experience it first-hand, but rather view it through someone else’s lens and point of view. For Baudrillard, reality in today’s world is not what can be reproduced, but something which has already been reproduced. This is what he called ‘hyper-real’, anything which is fully simulated.

In his book In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1983), Baudrillard debates that the modern era has entered into a phase of disintegration and collapse. He says that the old class structure has vanished entirely, leaving behind a nothingness, an empty space between the masses; their translucent reality. The masses no longer have a distinct status of their own. The plethora of surveys and statistical exercises have rendered the masses incapable of being responsive to meaningful political representation. All religious, philosophical and political ideologies have been readily absorbed and neutralized by them. He further says that the law has generalized everything to such an extent that no specificity has been retained. The law imposed upon the masses is a collection of confusions, assigning sexual, political and religious labels to anything and everything.

In his famous travelogue America, Baudrillard gives a new method of learning about the culture of any place. He emphasizes on the unreality and shallowness of the American culture. This he concluded by speed travelling through the Sates. By this method, he aimed at not getting bogged down by the American society’s ‘depth’. He compares America to a desert, where the cultural void is so great that the real and unreal mingle into a single indistinguishable perplexity. He does not aim at morally judging the American society, but rather studies it on a cultural level.

Indubitably, one of the most influential philosophers in the world – Jean Baudrillard was a French photographer, cultural theorist, provoking writer, political critic, and a sociologist. He was born in 1929 in the Northeastern city of France, Reims and died in March 2007. He wrote two hundred articles and twenty books, becoming one of the most dignified thinkers.

During his high school education years, he studied pataphysics under Emmanuel Peillet, a professor of philosophy. He was the first from his family to go to a university. At the Sorbonne University, he learned German literature after studying the language. This gave him the opportunity to teach at many different schools in 1960s for six years. While all the German bit was happening in his life, he began leaning towards the study of sociology.

The anecdote of Baudrillard’s photographic monographs were collected and assembled in a pamphlet which was fashioned by CAFA Art Museum.

In his photography as well as writing, Jean Baudrillard had a clear consciousness of reality’s illusion becoming apparent through a cracked veil. A 1998 assignment, Sao Palo is a representation of his work. The photograph acts as a visual poem complimenting Baudrillard’s idea that reality is hidden and people only see the facade behind which reality hides. The photo displays a mysterious and incomprehensible world.

The blank billboard in Las Vegas, 1996, is another work by Baudrillard that would surely confuse a lay man with no knowledge of what is being shown. The medium as in the billboard has nothing to say.

A exhibition titled Vanishing Techniques comprised of almost fifty photos was a prevalent introduction of the works by Baudrillard after his death. The images on display were chosen by his wife.

Jean Baudrillard passed away on March 6, 2007 in Paris, France. His assertions in sociology and philosophy continue to influence intellectual, the masses and the contemporary culture.

[LONDONFIELDS]

Christ. Talk about vital. Never take this down. And I love you all.

[k.t.]

min 4:42 "Animals have no unconscious (subconscious) because they have a territory. We, on the other hand, now have an unconscious because we have lost our territory" 🤯🤯🤯🤯