- Primarily a theorist of media and culture
- Associated with some aspects of what is called postmodernism (which is itself notoriously hard to articulate)
- rejection of grand narratives (sometimes called metanarratives, these are explanatory modes that order experience—examples might be "humans use reason to demystify the world" or "all that occurs is a result of God's will").
- fragmentation (when culture becomes skeptical of the whole idea of grand narratives the result is multiple fragments)
- multiplicity (when you don't have active grand narratives, you can have multiple simultaneous explanatory modes)
- Associated with some aspects of modernism (which is generally seen as a continuation of the Enlightenment goal of using human reason to order all aspects of existence)
- States that his goal is to trace the movements of modernist projects in the contemporary era of simulation, consumerism, and technology
- His work breaks roughly into four periods
- Sociology informed by and reacting against Marxism
- Theoretical work about signs, symbols, and the systems that they form
- Experimentation with textual forms (like the America piece)
- Scholarly cultural criticism
- an overarching theme is that efforts to undercover the truth about reality are a desperate attempt to deny its actual random and illusory nature
- The principle aspect of Baudrillard's work is the sign
- Signs are symbols that stand for something else...
- But they are also parts of a self-referencing system of signs
- Baudrillard thus splits up a real world and how it is represented. His claim is that signs have increasingly pulled away from the reality they symbolize and having increasingly become parts of a self-referential system.
- For Baudrillard, this is the hyperreal, the situation wherein we exist through a system of signs that invoke other signs rather than the real thing that they supposedly symbolize. For Baudrillard, we are now living completely in a map rather than using the map to refer to the reality it presents.
- You can perhaps see why Baudrillard is an explicit source for the film The Matrix. In that film, there is a real world, but humans exist in a computer simulation that symbolizes it, despite no longer having a connection with it. In fact the real world has gone to pot; the hyperreality inside of the matrix stays the same.
- Baudrillard states that the movement toward simulation has occurred in stages, and is linked to history:
- Symbolic order (feudal period): signs are clear, stable, and refer to basic reality
- Counterfeits (from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution): fakes of reality, such as the automaton
- Production (Industrial Revolution): replacements of the functions of humanity, such as the robot
- Simulation (the post-industrial world): humanity remade without necessary connection to the real, such as a cloned person
- Baudrillard was interested in media, technology, and culture, and he ascribed to Marshall McLuhan's assertion that the medium is the message--that is, it isn't the content of something that's important but the kind of world its medium establishes.
- So, after the railroad, it's not just that stuff can be carried on boxcars, but now the world has become dependent on that speed and connection.
- Baudrillard saw media like television establishing a simulation of reality, such as TV families, that made actual reality seem sub-normal. Again, we see how the medium establishes a worldview.
- Baudrillard also sees information transfer as neglecting interesting aspects of communication (or symbolic exchange). Speed is an issue here, because information can move faster than other aspects of relations.
- For Baudrillard, we are now in a situation where the abundance of information creates an uncertainty rather than a lack of information. As such, more information will not help, but instead fuels this scenario.
- Breaking with Marxism, Baudrillard sees consumption rather than production driving culture.
- Baudrillard's take on consumption leads to objects being central to his thought. Objects have two functions:
- their practical utility
- their sign value, or what their possession represents in a larger sign system
- hypertely is the state of contemporary culture--a state in which sign value has superiority over utility, and excess replication occurs for its own sake
- Baudrillard doesn't lament our state, but sees fatal strategies, non-rational engagements with the world that do not privilege humans as controllers of the world, as the appropriate response to the contemporary era of simulation.
|
|