JEAN BAUDRILLARD

BORN : 27JULY 1929 PARIS, FRANCE

DIED : 6 MARCH 2007(AGED77)
ALMA MATER : UNIVERSITY OF PARIS
ERA : 2OTH-21ST CENTURY PHILOSOPHY
REGION : WESTERN PHILOSOPHY
SCHOOL : CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY
WESTERN MARXISM
POST-MARXISM[1]
POST-STRUCTURALISM
POSTMODERNISM
INSTITUTIONS PARIS X NANTERRE
EUROPEAN GRADUATE SCHOOL
MAIN INTERESTS : MASS MEDIA
NOTABLE IDEAS : HYPER REALITY, SIGN VALUE, SIMULUCRA, DESERT OF THE
REAL
 Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher and cultural theorist.
 He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological
communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as simulation and hyper reality.
 He wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, gender relations, economics, social
history, art, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his best known works
are Seduction (1978), Simulacra and Simulation (1981), America (1986), and The Gulf
War Did Not Take Place (1991). His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and
specifically post-structuralism.

PERSONAL LIFE

 Baudrillard enjoyed baroque music; a favorite composer was Claudio Monteverdi.

 He also favoured rock music such as The Velvet Underground &Nico.Baudrillard was
married twice.
 He and his first wife Lucile Baudrillard had two children, Gilles and Anne.
 In 1970 during his first marriage, Baudrillard met 25 year old Marine Dupuis when she
arrived at the Paris Nanterre University where he was a professor.
 Marine went on to be a media artistic director. They married in 1994 when he was 65.
  Diagnosed with cancer in 2005, Baudrillard battled the disease two years from his
apartment on Rue Sainte-Beuve, Paris, dying at the age of 77.
 Marine Baudrillard curates Cool Memories, an association of Jean Baudrillard's friends.

KEY CONCEPTS
 In common with many post-structuralists, his arguments consistently draw upon the notion
that signification and meaning are both only understandable in terms of how particular words
or "signs" interrelate.
 From this starting point Baudrillard theorized broadly about human society based upon this
kind of self-referentiality.
 The subject is, rather, seduced by the object. He argued therefore that, in the final analysis, a
complete understanding of the minutiae of human life is impossible, and when people are
seduced into thinking otherwise they become drawn toward a "simulated" version of reality,
or, to use one of his neologisms, a state of "hyper reality." He wrote that there are four
ways of an object obtaining value. The four value-making processes are,

1. The functional value: an object's instrumental purpose (use

value). Example: a pen writes; a refrigerator cools.
2. The exchange value: an object's economic value. Example:
One pen may be worth three pencils, while one refrigerator
may be worth the salary earned by three months of work.
3. The symbolic value: an object's value assigned by a subject in
relation to another subject (i.e., between a giver and receiver).
Example: a pen might symbolize a student's school
graduation gift or a commencement speaker's gift; or a
diamond may be a symbol of publicly declared marital love.
4. The sign value: an object's value within a system of objects.
Example: a particular pen may, while having no added
functional benefit, signify prestige relative to another pen; a
diamond ring may have no function at all, but may suggest
particular social values, such as taste or class.
SIMULACRA AND SIMULATION
 As Baudrillard developed his work throughout the 1980s, he moved from economic theory to
mediation and mass communication.
 He denies any possibility of a (mimetic) duplication of reality; reality mediated through
language becomes a game of signs.
Simulation Example: ROLEX WATCH

 In his theoretical system all distinctions between the real and the fictional, between a copy
and the original, disappear".
  Simulation, Baudrillard claims, is the current stage of the simulacrum: all is composed of
references with no referents, a hyper reality.
 With the Industrial Revolution, the dominant simulacrum becomes the product, which can be
propagated on an endless production line.
 In current times, the dominant simulacrum is the model, which by its nature already stands
for endless reproducibility, and is itself already reproduced.
 Simulacra and Simulation is most known for its discussion of symbols, signs, and how they
relate to contemporaneity.
 The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are the significations and symbolism
of culture and media that construct perceived reality, the acquired understanding by which
our lives and shared existence are rendered legible.
Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no original, or that no longer have an original.
Simulacra Example: Armchair tourism
Imagine the possibility of visiting any place in the world you want, maybe France, the
Caribbean or even Alaska within one hour and without ever having to leave your
living room. This form of niche tourism is referred to as Armchair Tourism, a fairly
new way of exploring the earth without having to physically travel.

 ...The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that
there is none. The simulacrum is true.
Simulacra and Simulation delineates the sign-order into four stages:

1. The first stage is a faithful image/copy

2. The second stage is perversion of reality
3. The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality
4. The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any
reality

Simulacra and Simulation identifies three types of simulacra and identifies each with a
historical period:

1. First order, associated with the premodern period, where representation is clearly an
artificial placemarker for the real item. The uniqueness of objects and situations marks them
as irreproducibly real and signification obviously gropes towards this reality.
2. Second order, associated with the modernity of the Industrial Revolution, where
distinctions between representation and reality break down due to the proliferation of mass-
reproducible copies of items, turning them into commodities.
3. Third order, associated with the postmodernity of Late Capitalism, where the simulacrum
precedes the original and the distinction between reality and representation vanishes.
 ON THE PERSIAN GULF WAR
 Baudrillard's provocative 1991 book, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,raised his public
profile as an academic and political commentator.
 He argued that the first Gulf War was the inverse of the Clausewitzian formula: not "the
continuation of politics by other means," but "the continuation of the absence of politics by
other means." Accordingly, Saddam Hussein was not fighting the Coalition, but using the
lives of his soldiers as a form of sacrifice to preserve his power.
 The Coalition fighting the Iraqi military was merely dropping 10,000 tonnes of bombs daily,
as if proving to themselves that there was an enemy to fight.
 So, too, were the Western media complicit, presenting the war in real time, by recycling
images of war to propagate the notion that the U.S.-led Coalition and the Iraqi government
were actually fighting, but, such was not the case.
 Saddam Hussein did not use his military capacity (the Iraqi Air Force). His power was not
weakened, evinced by his easy suppression of the 1991 internal uprisings that followed
afterwards. Over all, little had changed. Saddam remained undefeated, the "victors" were not
victorious, and thus there was no war—i.e., the Gulf War did not occur.
 Some critics accused Baudrillard of instant revisionism; a denial of the physical action of the
conflict (which was related to his denial of reality in general).
 Consequently, Baudrillard was accused of lazy amoralism, cynical scepticism,
and Berkelian subjective idealism.
 Sympathetic commentators such as William Merrin, in his book Baudrillard and the Media,
have argued that Baudrillard was more concerned with the West's technological and political
dominance and the globalization of its commercial interests, and what that means for the
present possibility of war.
 Merrin argued that Baudrillard was not denying that something had happened, but merely
questioning whether that something was in fact war or a bilateral "atrocity masquerading as a
war."
 Merrin viewed the accusations of amorality as redundant and based on a misreading.
 In Baudrillard's own words: Saddam liquidates the communists, Moscow flirts even more
with him; he gases the Kurds, it is not held against him; he eliminates the religious cadres, the
whole of Islam makes peace with him.… Even…the 100,000 dead will only have been the
final decoy that Saddam will have sacrificed, the blood money paid in forfeit according to a
calculated equivalence, in order to preserve his power.
 What is worse is that these dead still serve as an alibi for those who do not want to have been
excited for nothing: at least these dead will prove this war was indeed a war and not
shameful and pointless.
The Gulf War oil spill, or the Persian Gulf oil spill, was one of the largest oil spills in history,
resulting from the Gulf War in 1991. In January of 1991, Iraqi forces allegedly began dumping oil
into the Persian Gulf to stop a U.S. coalition-led water landing on their shores. Despite quite high
initial estimates, the spill likely was about 4,000,000 US barrels (480,000 m3). Within the
following months of the spill, most clean-up was targeted at recovering oil, and very little clean-
up was done on Saudi Arabia’s highly-affected beaches. An initial study in 1993 found that the
spill will not have long-term environmental consequences, but many studies since 1991 have
concluded the opposite, claiming that the spill is responsible for environmental damage to
coastline sediments and marine species and ecosystems. Considered an act of environmental
terrorism, the spill was a heated political move that had implications for the larger Gulf War and
temporarily damaged Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
THE GULF WAR OIL SPILL

EXAMPLE: DEEPWATER HORIZON (WORST OIL SPILLS)

BY
KARTHIKEYANI S
REG NO: 20GA008