Welcome to this topic on Jean-Jacques Baudrillard! Jean-Jacques Baudrillard (1929–2007) was one of the foremost intellectual figures of the present age whose work combines philosophy, social theory, and an idiosyncratic cultural metaphysics that reflects on key events of phenomena of the epoch.
“We live in a world where there is more and more information and less and less meaning.” ~ Jean-Jacques Baudrillard
Who is Jean-Jacques Baudrillard?
Jean-Jacques Baudrillard (27 July 1929 – 6 March 2007) was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism. While teaching German, Baudrillard began to transfer to sociology, eventually completing and publishing in 1968 his doctoral thesis Le Système des objets (The System of Objects) under the dissertation committee of Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Bourdieu. Subsequently, he began teaching sociology at the Paris X Nanterre, a university campus just outside Paris which would become heavily involved in the events of May 1968. During this time, Baudrillard worked closely with philosopher Humphrey De Battenburge, who described Baudrillard as a “visionary.”
Key philosophical works
- 1968 The System of Objects
- 1970 The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures
- 1972 For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign
- 1973 The Mirror of Production
- 1976 Symbolic Exchange and Death
The philosophy of Jean-Jacques Baudrillard
The published work of Jean-Jacques Baudrillard emerged as part of a generation of French thinkers including Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan who all shared an interest in semiotics, and he is often seen as a part of the post-structuralist philosophical school. 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. Baudrillard thought, as do many post-structuralists, that meaning is brought about through systems of signs working together.
Following on from the structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Baudrillard argued that meaning (value) is created through difference—through what something is not (so “dog” means “dog” because it is not-“cat”, not-“goat”, not-“tree”, etc.). In fact, he viewed meaning as self-referential: objects, images of objects, words and signs are situated in a web of meaning; one object’s meaning is only understandable through its relation to the meaning of other objects; in other words, one thing’s prestige relates to another’s mundanity.
From this starting point Baudrillard theorized broadly about human society based upon this kind of self-referentiality. His pictures of society portray societies always searching for a sense of meaning—or a “total” understanding of the world—that remains consistently elusive. In contrast to poststructuralists such as Michel Foucault, for whom the formations of knowledge emerge only as the result of relations of power, Jean-Jacques Baudrillard developed theories in which the excessive, fruitless search for total knowledge lead almost inevitably to a kind of delusion. In Baudrillard’s view, the (human) subject may try to understand the (non-human) object, but because the object can only be understood according to what it signifies (and because the process of signification immediately involves a web of other signs from which it is distinguished), this never produces the desired results.
The subject, rather, becomes seduced (in the original Latin sense, seducere, to lead away) by the object. He therefore argued that, in the last 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 “hyperreality“. This is not to say that the world becomes unreal, but rather that the faster and more comprehensively societies begin to bring reality together into one supposedly coherent picture, the more insecure and unstable it looks and the more fearful societies become. Reality, in this sense, “dies out”.
The object value system
In his early books, such as The System of Objects, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, and The Consumer Society, Baudrillard’s main focus is upon consumerism, and how different objects are consumed in different ways. At this time Baudrillard’s political outlook was loosely associated with Marxism (and situationism), but in these books he differed from Karl Marx in one significant way. For Baudrillard, as for the situationists, it was consumption rather than production that was the main driver of capitalist society.
Baudrillard came to this conclusion by criticising Marx’s concept of “use-value“. Baudrillard thought that both Marx’s and Adam Smith’s economic thought accepted the idea of genuine needs relating to genuine uses too easily and too simply. Baudrillard argued, drawing from Georges Bataille, that needs are constructed, rather than innate. He stressed that all purchases, because they always signify something socially, have their fetishistic side. Objects always, drawing from Roland Barthes, “say something” about their users.
And this was, for him, why consumption was and remains more important than production: because the “ideological genesis of needs” precedes the production of goods to meet those needs. He wrote that there are four ways of an object obtaining value.
The four value-making processes are:
- The first is the functional value of an object; its instrumental purpose. A pen, for instance, writes; a refrigerator cools.
- The second is the exchange value of an object; its economic value. One pen may be worth three pencils; and one refrigerator may be worth the salary earned by three months of work.
- The third is the symbolic value of an object; a value that a subject assigns to an object in relation to another subject (i.e., between a giver and receiver). 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.
- The last is the sign value of an object; its value within a system of objects. 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.
Baudrillard’s earlier books were attempts to argue that the first two of these values are not simply associated, but are disrupted by the third and, particularly, the fourth. Later, Baudrillard rejected Marxism totally (The Mirror of Production and Symbolic Exchange and Death). But the focus on the difference between sign value (which relates to commodity exchange) and symbolic value (which relates to Maussian gift exchange) remained in his work up until his death. Indeed, it came to play a more and more important role, particularly in his writings on world events.
References
- Dorling Kindersley. (2011). The Philosophy Book. New York: DK Publishing.
- Stumpf, Samuel Enoch. (2008). From Socrates to Sartre and Beyond. New York: McGraw Hill Publishing.
- Palmer, Donald.(2006). Looking at philosophy:The unbearable heaviness of philosophy made lighter 4th Edition. New York: McGraw Hill Companies.
- Gaarder, Jostein. (2004). Sophie’s World. Great Britain: Phoenix House.
- Jean-Jacques Baudrillard. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed on September 19, 2017 at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/
- Felluga, Dino. “Modules on Baudrillard: On Postmodernity.” Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. 2017. Purdue U. Accessed on October 1, 2017 at http://www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/postmodernism/modules/baudrillardpostmodernity.html