Baudrillard, Jean
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- Baudrillard's Great Science Fiction Novel
- The Key to Understanding Jean Baudrillard
- The most useless book I have ever read.
- Where is real?
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Simulacra and Simulation (The Body, In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism)
Jean Baudrillard
Manufacturer: University of Michigan Press
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ASIN: 0472065211 |
Book Description
The first full-length translation in English of an essential work of postmodernist thought
Customer Reviews:
Baudrillard's Great Science Fiction Novel.......2007-04-12
This is Baudrillard's most famous work, and indeed, it is a must-read for those who wish to acquaint themselves with the basics of postmodern thought. It is beautifully written, and comes across like a sort of non-fiction equivalent of William Gibson's Neuromancer with its glittering display of polished, gleaming words patterned into strange, mercurial sentences that are not always easy to follow. But, as with Finnegans Wake, it is not so much the particular thought of the moment that counts, as it is the impression and impact upon the mental sensorium of the total experience. Baudrillard is a dazzling word-smith and it is likely that you will come away from this book with one or two new words to add to your vocabulary.
One of the things, of course, that has made this book so popular is its visual quotation in the science fiction film The Matrix, but I must say that the book does little towards an elucidation of that film. Indeed, Baudrillard himself has stated his dislike of the film (see the book "The Conspiracy of Art" for his comments), and he has stated how it compares less favorably with films built around similar themes such as The Truman Show, Mulholland Drive and others (I think David Cronenberg's Existenz is a much better take on the virtual reality theme. The Matrix seems cliched by comparison, especially since Cronenberg was already there first with his early 80's classic Videodrome). The theme of hyperreality displacing the real is not really what The Matrix is all about (there is too little in it irony for that; and no ambiguity; instead it concerns how technology robs the human soul of its spiritual potentialities) but it is what Simulacra and Simulation is about.
The French philosophers are fond of developing a single metaphysical concept and then exploring its ramifications in numerous books and their sequels: Debord's "Spectacle," for instance, is essentially equivalent to Baudrillard's hyperreality; Foucault's "episteme," though a completely different idea, is nonetheless monolithic in Foucault's thought. And much of Baudrillard's writings are an exploration of his concept of the hyperreal and how it has displaced the real.
The point of the book is that we postmoderns live inside a media-generated dome that seals us off from the "real" world. Indeed, we are so convinced by our own fabrications that we can no longer differentiate reality from its simulacrum. When spending money on gambling in Las Vegas, are we really losing all that money, or is it just a part of the "game"?
The best essay in the book is "The Precession of the Simulacra," and it is also the longest. I saved it for last and began with the shorter essays. Baudrillard's piece on J.G. Ballard's novel Crash is one of the best in the collection, as is his essay on "Hypermarket and Hypercommodity" and "The Beauborg Effect." Each of these pieces feels more like reading a science fiction novel than anything else but, let's face it, we live in a world that is stranger than science fiction. It takes an artist to make the contours of such a world visible to our perception, and Baudrillard does a fine job of this. He is, however, less successful with his pitiful one page ramblings on Apocalypse Now, which is disappointing and sheds almost no light on Coppola's masterpiece. (For this, the reader would do well to consult Ebert's Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons).
I confess that there are paragraphs I did not understand and words that sound as if they are made up, but this is actually true of most authors who have something profound to say (Lewis Mumford, for instance, or Heidegger). But Simulacra and Simulation is an important work and should be read despite its difficulties. Read it just the way you would a poem by Holderlin or Rilke. That is, don't try too hard to understand it, just let the imagery sink into your consciousness and enjoy the alterations that it produces upon you.
--John David Ebert
author, Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society
The Key to Understanding Jean Baudrillard.......2007-01-09
Baudrillard's classic is neither easy to read, nor is it the last word in continental postmodernism. It is also replete with ideas of questionable merit. So, why I have rated it with fives stars? Because buried within its pages, among the dross and the drivel, are enough intellectual gems to make the entire exercise more than worthwhile! Even with its flaws, Simulacra and Simulation reveals Jean Baudrillard to be one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century. Any person deeply interested in critically understanding the postmodern, media saturated era in which we live, needs to read this book.
The most useless book I have ever read........2006-09-19
Hardly being a serious look into the (supposed) simulated world, Simulacra and Simulation unnecessarily confuses, compounds, and over-estimates the reality of simulation, and implies simulation in virtually everything while failing to give any real evidence or examples for this phenomenon. Through and through, Baudrillard fails to adequately define his terms, concerns, and sources for his critiques. While never settling on one particular point, his arbitrary method of critiquing never moves beyond the realm of opinion. Critical analysis of the subject matter (whatever that is) is never applied, instead being sacrificed for ever more obscured superficial observations. Baudrillard gives us no example as to the cause of his concerns (whatever those may be) let alone giving us any real solutions as to how we may pierce through our alleged self created illusions. Nor does he give us any real insight as to how these critiques can be applied in any useful way to our education or our daily life. If this is what is passing for philosophy today, I can only imagine how useless the field will become in fifty years if we continue to look to Baudrillard as the top of his field. Superfluous and meaningless double-talk is all you will get out of this useless excuse for a book. For anyone interested in reading "Simulacra and Simulation", I would sooner recommend Dr. Seuss "Green Eggs and Ham." You will have more fun reading it, and you will probably learn more as well.
Where is real?.......2006-09-08
What is real anymore? Where can I find it at? In our mass-multi-media world, is there really anything "real" anywhere? Or is it all just one large simulation? I do not claim to be on the Postmodern bandwagon, or to 100% agree with their ideas and thoughts, but this was a very interesting read that will possibly make you ask "What is real?"
Jean Baudrillard is a Rockstar.......2006-04-15
Jean Baudrillard is not practical. He discusses the death of the real in an often persuasive way, but offers no conclusions as to how this should affect the practice of cultural theory or human behavior. Nor does he offer suggestions for preventing the death of the real--he just wallows in it.
Still, Baudrillard sure is a hoot. I love reading him the way I love reading J.G. Ballard and watching David Cronenberg movies. He offers a great, cynical rush: highly recommended to masturbatory pessimists and fans of new wave science-fiction.
Average customer rating:
- Difficult reading, but interesting insights (sometimes swallowed up by verbiage)
- Great book, bad edition.
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Simulations (Foreign Agents)
Jean Baudrillard
Manufacturer: Semiotext(e)
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ASIN: 0936756020 |
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Simulations never existed as a book before it was "translated" into English. Actually it came from two different bookCovers written at different times by Jean Baudrillard. The first part of Simulations, and most provocative because it made a fiction of theory, was "The Procession of Simulacra." It had first been published in Simulacre et Simulations (1981). The second part, written much earlier and in a more academic mode, came from L'Echange Symbolique et la Mort (1977). It was a half-earnest, half-parodical attempt to "historicize" his own conceit by providing it with some kind of genealogy of the three orders of appearance: the Counterfeit attached to the classical period; Production for the industrial era; and Simulation, controlled by the code. It was Baudrillard's version of Foucault's Order of Things and his ironical commentary of the history of truth. The book opens on a quote from Ecclesiastes asserting flatly that "the simulacrum is true." It was certainly true in Baudrillard's book, but otherwise apocryphal.
One of the most influential essays of the 20th century, Simulations was put together in 1983 in order to be published as the first little black book of Semiotext(e)'s new Foreign Agents Series. Baudrillard's bewildering thesis, a bold extrapolation on Ferdinand de Saussure's general theory of general linguistics, was in fact a clinical vision of contemporary consumer societies where signs don't refer anymore to anything except themselves. They all are generated by the matrix.
In effect Baudrillard's essay (it quickly became a must to read both in the art world and in academe) was upholding the only reality there was in a world that keeps hiding the fact that it has none. Simulacrum is its own pure simulacrum and the simulacrum is true. In his celebrated analysis of Disneyland, Baudrillard demonstrates that its childish imaginary is neither true nor false, it is there to make us believe that the rest of America is real, when in fact America is a Disneyland. It is of the order of the hyper-real and of simulation. Few people at the time realized that Baudrillard's simulacrum itself wasn't a thing, but a "deterrence machine," just like Disneyland, meant to reveal the fact that the real is no longer real and illusion no longer possible. But the more impossible the illusion of reality becomes, the more impossible it is to separate true from false and the real from its artificial resurrection, the more panic-stricken the production of the real is.
Customer Reviews:
Difficult reading, but interesting insights (sometimes swallowed up by verbiage).......2007-01-02
Jean Baudrillard, postmodern thinker, despairs; he claims, in "Forget Foucault," that there is an "impossibility of any politics" in our current situation. An important part of this context are media simulations, of reality so obscured by the play of images completely unrelated to any "reality" which might be out there that we are hopelessly incapable of arriving at any judgments on which to base political decisions and actions. Images on television and in the movies and in other media are "floating signifiers," having no real connection to concrete referents. The key concept associated with Baudrillard is simulations and the simulacrum. He begins by quoting Ecclesiastes: "The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth that conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true" (by the way, this quotation may be a simulacrum; I could not find it in Ecclesiastes!). Simulations began historically as replicas of the real, as reflections of "reality." However, with time, simulations have become increasingly detached from concrete "real" references. Simulations do not have reference points or substance or any tie to "reality." Simulations have become "a real without origin or reality"--a hyperreal. We face a procession of images and simulations, and lose sight of the simple fact that they are "floating signifiers." The simulacra become real for us.
Put in post-structural (or postmodern) terms, the models created are floating signifiers (simulations in Baudrillard's terms) which structure people's discourse with one another and shape their behavior. Images become crucial in politics. After presidential debates or major policy speeches or elections, the "spin patrol" gets going. These are the spokespersons of the parties or candidates who try to convince the audience that their simulations of the event are better than their opponents' simulations. In the process, no one particularly cares what actually happened or what was said. It is the simulations pushed by the various actors that become the news.
Baudrillard's writing is challenging; many will write him off as an unreadable crank. Nonetheless, the underlying concept of the simulacrum is fascinating and generates much reflection. This is a postmodern work that may actually speak to some real world issues. . . .
Great book, bad edition........2004-06-22
A very interesting read on the nature of reality. Baudrillard has a wonderful way of shuffling your thinking that can only be understood by reading his work first hand. I highly recommend this work, but I would suggest buying a different edition; the Semiotext edition fell to pieces the first time I read it.
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The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society)
Jean Baudrillard
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ASIN: 0761956921 |
Book Description
This is the first English-language translation of Jean BaudrillardÆs contemporary classic on the sociology of consumption. Originally published in 1970, the book was one of the first to focus on the processes and meaning of consumption in contemporary culture. At a time when others were fixated with the production process, Baudrillard could be found making the case that consumption is now the axis of culture. He demonstrates how consumption is related to the goal of economic growth and he maps out a social theory of consumption. Many of the themes that would later make Baudrillard famous are sketched out here for the first time. In particular, his concepts of simulation and the simulacrum receive their earliest systematic treatment. Written at a time when Baudrillard was moving away from both Marxism and institutional sociology, the book is more systematic than his later works. He is still pursuing the task of locating consumption in culture and society. So the reader will find here his most organized discussion of mass media culture, the meaning of leisure, and anomie in affluent society. There is also a fascinating chapter on the body that shows yet again Baudrillard's extraordinary prescience in flagging the importance of vital subjects in contemporary culture long before his colleagues. Baudrillard is widely acclaimed as a key thinker in sociology, communication, and cultural studies. This book makes available to English-speaking readers one of his most important works. It will be devoured by the steadily expanding circle of Baudrillard scholars, and it will also be required reading for students of the sociology of culture, communication, and cultural studies.
Customer Reviews:
Symbolic exchange.......2002-07-01
This book is an earlier text of Baudrillard. Baudrillard is considered as a major theorist of postmodernism. But at the time he wrote this book, he was not postmodernist but Marxist. In 1973, Baudrillard divorced with Marxism. But before that year, he maintained the Marxist stance. His main subject was the political economy in Marxist style and the society of consumption in Frankfurt school¡¯s style. He was a pupil of Henry Lefevre who expanded the scope of Marxism into the study of everyday life. Baudrillard took the area his mentor opened up, but approached it somewhat differently: he borrowed frameworks of structuralism. He transformed Marx¡¯s distinction of use value/exchange value into the semiotics of consumption. Society is the field where symbolic exchange, in Marcel Mauss¡¯s term, takes place. What is exchanged in symbolic exchange is not use value but exchange (or symbolic) value. We consume the object not only of its use value but of its symbolic value. Object is exchanged as sign in symbolic exchange. Goods could signify the social status. Object could be desired not only in its use value but in its symbolic value that make difference to its owner from others: consumption could be interpreted as the logic of social distinction. In later texts, he asserted that capitalist society is centered not on production but on consumption. There could be not much objection upto this point. But, he argues, the logic of social distinction is not produced by consumer. It¡¯s the system of signification that is imposed on consumer. In this point, Baudrillard depicts such an unreal picture of iron cage as Frankfurt school did. The system of signification is illustrated as the something of a big brother we can¡¯t exercise any say. But that kind of image is not the one we experience in daily life. Marx said, ¡®Men make history, but not in their own choice.¡¯ Social fact like language transcend individual. We didn¡¯t choose our own mother tongue. We were born into it. But it doesn¡¯t deny the point that we make history. The system Baudrillard delineated is not unearthly fantasy. But where does it come from? It¡¯s the creature we make and change day by day. But in Baudrillard¡¯s world, such a point is lost. On Baudrillard¡¯s picture, the individual is lost. Baudrillard only takes a shot of horror film. In terms of methodology, Baudrillard makes non-sense.
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- Baudrillard vs. Art = entertaining and informative
- Baudrillard sees the Emperor naked again
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The Conspiracy of Art
Jean Baudrillard
Manufacturer: Semiotext(e)
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ASIN: 1584350288 |
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The images from Abu Ghraib are as murderous for America as those of the World Trade Center in flames. The whole West is contained in the burst of sadistic laughter of the American soldiers, as it is behind the construction of the Israeli wall. This is where the truth of these images lies. Truth, but not veracity. As virtual as the war itself, their specific violence adds to the specific violence of the war.
In The Conspiracy of Art, Baudrillard questions the privilege attached to art by its practitioners. Art has lost all desire for illusion: feeding back endlessly into itself, it has turned its own vanishment into an art unto itself. Far from lamenting the "end of art," Baudrillard celebrates art's new function within the process of insider-trading. Spiraling from aesthetic nullity to commercial frenzy, art has become transaesthetic, like society as a whole.
Conceived and edited by life-long Baudrillard collaborator Sylvère Lotringer, The Conspiracy of Art presents Baudrillard's writings on art in a complicitous dance with politics, economics, and media. Culminating with "War Porn," a scathing analysis of the spectacular images from Abu Ghraib prison as a new genre of reality TV, the book folds back on itself to question the very nature of radical thought.
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Baudrillard vs. Art = entertaining and informative.......2006-07-05
This is a fascinating collection of some of Baudrillard's most polemical writings on art. He freely admits in one of the interviews within that he is, by no means, an art expert. He doesn't appreciate it and he doesn't necessarily *like* it. He does respect traditional/classical art's beauty and importance. This positions him in an excellent place to offer remarkably disinterested observations. He's not partial to any one movement, any one school, or any one artist (with the possible exception of Andy Warhol) and he pulls no punches in his critique of the meaninglessness of contemporary art.
It is important to note that Baudrillard is NOT an art hater. From his interviews and from other writings, I get the impression that art is simply "not his thing". I believe this is a positive factor because he isn't required to tip-toe around issues for fear of being rejected by the art community, a community he is happy to avoid altogether.
As a student of contemporary art, and as a contemporary artist myself, I don't always agree with Baudrillard, at least to the extent that he goes. In his essay, "The Conspiracy of Art", he tends to make sweeping generalizations. Such is the format of his polemic - a brief essay. Had he developed these ideas in a longer format, I'm sure some points would be smoothed by further explanation and clarification. Fortunately, this book includes and number of interviews where he explains some of his points and gets a chance to defend himself against his many critics.
I believe this text would be most useful to any student of contemporary art. Baudrillard does raise many important issues, even if his conclusions are questionable. Even if you hate every word, it's at least an amusing read. I've always enjoyed his style. It's very conversational - a welcome relief from reading the prolix, convoluted texts of Deleuze and Lacan. He is clear, cogent, and concise.
Baudrillard sees the Emperor naked again.......2006-02-20
Contemporary "art" endlessing pleasing itself with how "clever" it is - how "important" it is - how "valuable" it is. Baudrillard sees through it all and offers some great critiques. Again, to some he may seem the seer of the obvious but others put up great resistance to his ideas because it destroys their privileged, little cozy world. The film Zoolander does much the same thing with its hilarious send-up of the "fashion" world - the "Derelique" campaign, turning the "look" of homeless people into the latest haute-couture. The fashion world is a conspiracy and so is the contemporary art world. The commodification of the banal - the banal world turned into "brilliant" concepts by art stuporstars. I think Baudrillard would agree with Hansel in Zoolander when he says: "Derelique" my balls.
Average customer rating:
- :D nice book
- keen insights within a cloud of pompous prose
- Rewarding 1968 analysis of psycho-sociology of consumption
- A seminal force in semiotics Beaudrillard's first book rocks
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The System of Objects (Radical Thinkers)
Jean Baudrillard
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ASIN: 1844670538 |
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A cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society, The System of Objects is a tour de force—a theoretical letter-in-a-bottle tossed into the ocean in 1968, which brilliantly communicates to us all the live ideas of the day.
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:D nice book .......2007-05-18
It's really a nice book...
everyone should get one lol
keen insights within a cloud of pompous prose.......2004-09-23
Baudrillard's SYSTEM OF OBJECTS stands as a landmark... the first book by one of France's leading men of letters, an astute social critic (and deconstructionist?! critical theorist?!). The author discusses the roles objects play in our lives, from mirrors to automobiles to furniture. He dissects the role and purpose of credit (in the late 1960's; his ideas about the expansion of credit purchasing are humorous in hindsight). Author devotes sections to gadgets, gizmos, and robots.
Some of OBJECTS' highlights: a discussion of why the rich and other status seekers acquire old things, a critique of collectors and their motivations ("everything that cannot be invested in human relationships is invested in objects."), and a commendable exegesis of the personalization of cars (since the 1970s this critique could be expanded to houses). In addition the section on credit is juicy: "the credit system is the acme of man's irresponsibility to himself."
Should I credit the translator with handling a difficult text well? I can't say. I don't read French (at least not on Baudrillard's level). However, the reader is left with some of the most pompous and opaque prose. Nothing is stated simply. Example: "In the love relationship the tendency to break the object down into discrete details in accordance with a perverse autoerotic system is slowed by the living unity of the other person." Another: "We may thus trace functional mythologies, born of technics itself, all the way to a sort of fatality in which the world-mastering technology seems to crystallize in the form of an inverse and threatening purpose." Here's a favorite: "Thus freed from practical functions and from the human gestural system, forms become purely relative with respect both to one another and to the space to which they lend 'rhythm.' "
These overwrought and ridiculous passages would be humorous, but they impede the reader's understanding of the text. Various worthwhile statements pepper the book throughout, which could be condensed into a sort of "famous quotes by Baudrillard," perhaps as captions in a book of photographs, a coffee-table book. I recommend this currently nonexistent product. Until its creation, we must be partially satisfied by SYSTEM OF OBJECTS.
Ken Miller
Rewarding 1968 analysis of psycho-sociology of consumption.......2003-07-28
Some contemporary French philosophy is a fascinating and invigorating mix of psychology, sociology, semiotics and, dare one say it, poetry. In the English speaking world, Marshall McLuhan is probably the philosopher whose style is most similar to this first, 1968, book by the now well known Jean Baudrillard.
What is the book about? In a sense it is about the meaning of low tech everyday objects, and thus it is also about the psycho-sociology of our technology. Take mirrors, for example, which were frankly disappearing as an element of interior decoration when Baudrillard wrote his book. Yet for years, mirrors were an important fixture of well-to-do bourgeois interiors; they were opulent, expensive objects which in Baudrillard's words permitted "...the self-indulgent bourgeois
individual to exercise his privilege --reproduce his own image and revel in his possessions". Family portraits and photographs represent diachronic mirrors of the family, and thus played a similar narcissistic role in decoration. Baudrillard analyses clocks, lighting, glass, seating, antiques and the drive to automate and miniaturize gadgets and tools, and always comes up with provocative, sometimes maddening, insights into modern society and one's place in it --and after all what is philosophy
for but to make you think?
There is a brilliant and probably timeless exploration of the passion of collecting and leads up nicely to what the bulk of the book is devoted to: the study of systems of objects (one of the main chapters is aptly titled "The Socio-Ideological System of Objects and Their Consumption"). What do we yearn to express through technology? What is it it that fascinates us about robots? Why is there such a proliferation of automatism, accessory features, inessential features to the point where
an object's dysfunctions are as important as its functions? Baudrillard acknowledges his debt to some of Lewis Mumford's ideas, and deplores with him that too often we try to solve problems by building a machine (perhaps nowadays we would tend to develop software, or in Baudrillard's terms simulate) and thus not only fall wide of the mark but also reveal clear signs of social ineptitude and paralysis. Fashion, consumption, technology are intertwined themes in modern society, feeding off each other and leading to a world that is at once systematized, fragile and baroque, in the sense that the proliferation of forms seems to be more important than mining for substance. It is interesting to compare some of these insights with a more recent book by another French philosopher, Gilles Lipovetsky, on fashion in modern societies ("The empire of the ephemeral", 1987).
The book ends by looking at the role credit and advertising play in the consumption of systems of objects, and thus completes what the book's jacket indicates is "a cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society". Baudrillard is a humanist critic of technology and consumer society and uses psychoanalytical ideas as weapons to grapple with his subject. The book is by turns, infuriating, keen, stimulating but in the end one feels that, curiously, it lacks a certain depth; it plays with
mirrors and is content with catching the light and obtaining the occasional blinding flash; but sometimes that the criticisms seem a little too one-sided or perhaps I simply prefer more constructive criticism. Still, the book is a tour-de-force, and I feel that the translator, James Benedict, did a fine job with a difficult text.
A seminal force in semiotics Beaudrillard's first book rocks.......2000-05-12
If you're academically inclined and into semiotics, this book should be part of your library. Any designer of systems, whether they be Web applications, lemon squeezers, or a marketing campaign, would probably find use of the insights offered here.
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- On Baudrillard's America
- Baudrillard's Great Prose Poem
- Sharp and poetic
- Postmodern Tocqesville
- A simply amazing read
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America
Jean Baudrillard
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ASIN: 0860919781 |
Customer Reviews:
On Baudrillard's America.......2007-05-01
I expected Baudrillard to get out of the box and give us some real insight into America. However, this book felt more like an angry diatribe from a collapsing empire than real thoughtful commentary. Read Barthes' Empire of Signs (on Japan) to see how good, and unbiased French critical philosophy can be.
Baudrillard's Great Prose Poem.......2007-04-10
Since his recent death, there has been a lot of Baudrillard bashing in the media. He is variously written off as a "comedian of ideas," as obscurantist, as saying everything about nothing and nothing about everything. Indeed, these are claims that can be said to be true of French cultural discourse in general, but they are actually inaccurate when used to describe Baudrillard, who really did have interesting and important things to say about culture. His prose is difficult; there is no denying that. But then so is Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, Oswald Spengler, etc. Would it be wise to characterize these men as having nothing important to say because of the difficulty involved in working through their dense prose? Of course not. While Baudrillard is neither as profound nor, ultimately, as insightful as these other philosophers--and this is generally true of French thought as opposed to German thought, despite what your English professors would have you believe--he is witty and entertaining.
America provides the novice with a good in-road to his thinking, since Baudrillard is more relaxed and informal in these meditations upon what, after all, is a very informal land, indeed. The interesting thing about this book is that Baudrillard's attitude toward American culture--and this is certainly atypical of the average Euro thinker--is not condescending. This is a Frenchman (for a change) who is genuinely fascinated by America and its kitschy world of movie screens, parking lots, freeways, strip malls and airports. What fascinates him, in particular, as he writes in his chapter on "Utopia Achieved," is how American society represents such a radical break with history. It is an achieved utopia that has fled from the nightmare of world history and managed to succeed in erecting a civilization in which that very history is denied and largely ignored. Thus, the ahistorical cities of the American Southwest, and L.A. in particular, are places where events with inward cultural significance no longer take place. Instead, it is a world in which history has been replaced by historical simulacra in theme parks like Disneyland or the Getty Museum or Venice Beach. No more history, Baudrillard insists, means no more culture. America is just an endless horizontal expanse of kitsch and hyperreal meaninglessness utterly devoid of significance. And yet he does not mean this derisively, as a typical Euro thinker would. He is fascinated by the boldness and insolence of this attempt to achieve a paradise on earth in which history has been rendered obsolete. Bookstores, coffee shops, museums: that is Old World; shopping malls, theme parks, and theme towns like Las Vegas; that is the New. And Baudrillard is utterly taken by it all. He admits the shallowness of American culture, and then turns around and embraces it for exactly what it is. Americans, he says, are at their worst when they try to duplicate European high culture with their insipid California wines and their all-encompassing museums. They are better off, he says, with their roller coasters and their Hollywood movies. That, after all, is what is original in the world today.
Ultimately, then, Baudrillard's very readable book is a celebration of American culture. And, in many ways, it is an introduction to Americans of their own world, since those who are submerged in a particular environment cannot see that very environment due to its disappearance into banality. It takes an outsider to help us see ourselves anew, for only an outsider (or an artist) is capable of holding up the mirror to reveal ourselves as we really are.
In short, this is a great place to start if you have never read Baudrillard. It is highly readable and very well written. But Baudrillard is always read best as a kind of prose poet, not a true philosopher. People who claim not to be able to understand him are trying, as it were, too hard to understand him. His prose is best read as poetry, and America is best understood as a prose poem about the historyless civilization of the New World.
--John David Ebert,
author of Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons
Sharp and poetic.......2005-12-25
If some of the reviewers could forgive Baudrillard for being French, they might be able to see his razor sharp eye and lucid thoughts. Baudrillard acknowledges America for what it is, and although at times may seem critical, he seems to love it in his own way. One of the best books on the subject by one of the most brilliant thinkers.
Postmodern Tocqesville.......2005-10-06
Jean Baudrillard, Paris's premier hyperpostmodernist theoretician delivers a highly evocative travelogue of his time in the U.S. He visits the Southwestern desert, Salt Lake City, Minneapolis, NYC, L.A., and a few other places.
The Baudrillard writing America, we must remember, is not the Freudo-Marxian sociologist of the 70s; rather, we are dealing here with the post-simulacra Baudrillard, deeply fascinated by the final materialization and (ex-)termination of the project known as modernity, and deeply critical of the implications and consequences of this epochal completion: the emergence of "hyperreal" phenomena (the end of reality in the very excess of reality), the sovereign reign of copies without originals, etc. etc.
So, for Baudrillard, America is really the site of the literal materialization of modernity, as opposed to Old Europe, which he dismisses as having never really practiced modernity, despite producing numerous ideologies of the modern (the Englightenment, Marxism, etc. etc.) Consequently, he is far more interested in the spectacle of America (Disneyland, drive-through restaurants, L.A. architecture, liposuction, mormon temples, etc.) than he is in America's "culture." He demands that Americans remain as pragmatic as they can be and to leave theory to Europe, which is a beautiful if impossible demand.
His vision of America is speed-driven and post-apocalyptic, ever-filtered by the realization that American life is the wasteland of culture, meaning, and, ultimately, signifiers.
A simply amazing read.......2005-08-12
This book was an incredible read! The extremely spatial nature of the text unfolds throughout each line, disclosing a thought process that is evolving as much, if not more than incredible journey you are taken on as Baudrillard manifest a vision of a nowaday hyperreality. Sculptural, sci-fi, timeless and visionary!
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- Recommended introduction to an important cultural theorist
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Symbolic Exchange and Death (Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society)
Jean Baudrillard
Manufacturer: Sage Publications Ltd
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ASIN: 0803983999 |
Book Description
Jean Baudrillard is one of the most celebrated and controversial of contemporary social theorists. Translated into English for the first time, this remarkable volume examines the full extent of his critical appraisal of social theories including traditional Marxism, cybernetics, ethnography, psychoanalysis, and feminist thought. In particular, it offers the most complete elaboration of Baudrillard's concept of the simulacrum and his reorientation of social theory toward the issues of fashion, the body, and death. Symbolic Exchange and Death, originally published in France in 1976, is a recognized classic and one of the most important sources for the redefinition of contemporary social thought. "Just when everyone is bored with Baudrillard, the academic establishment finally gets it together to translate the po-mo prophet's most important book. First published in 1976, this has appeared piecemeal in various guerrilla translations and already had its cultural effect. It's just a relief to get the full SP on the semiology of the death drive." -- I-D "This is easily Jean Baudrillard's most important work. It is a key intervention in the debates on modernity and postmodernity and the site of his postmodern turn. Anyone who wants to understand the complexity and provocativeness of Baudrillard's richest period must read this book." --Douglas Kellner, University of Texas at Austin
Customer Reviews:
Recommended introduction to an important cultural theorist.......2001-06-05
Jean Baudrillard has an insatiable desire to stay ahead of the game, to push things further and further. Symbolic Exchange and Death, written in 1976 but surprisingly not translated in English until 1993, is a key text because it sets out in challenging but relatively clear terms Baudrillard's radical approach before his more recent period based upon `fatal strategies' which travels into the ethereal and obscure. Symbolic Exchange and Death fundamentally operates as a genealogy of our dominant system of political economy and the underlying spectre of a pre-existing Symbolic Order. This involves a catastrophic challenge to Marxian and Freudian thought and traditional social approaches. It develops the earlier works of Michel Foucault and phenomenologists such as R.D. Laing to a more radical stance which begins to turn many widely accepted beliefs on their head. It also demonstrates that Baudrillard is not at all the high priest of postmodernism as was thought in the latter part of the 1980s but is a relentless poststructuralist. Despite Baudrillard's own later consignment of the work to a bygone era of dialecticism, Symbolic Exchange and Death, twenty five years on still retains an explosive potency. Fascinating, controversial and unputdownable - will inevitably draw readers to explore the author's other works.
Average customer rating:
- Short and Sweet
- Opinion never constitutes reality!
- So what?
- The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.
- Pure sociological poetry
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The Gulf War Did Not Take Place
Jean Baudrillard
Manufacturer: Indiana University Press
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ASIN: 0253210038 |
Customer Reviews:
Short and Sweet.......2007-02-15
This book basically describes how the first Iraq war differed from traditional wars of the past. It is not for everyone, Baudrillard has the unfortunate position of being too loose with ideas to be taken very seriously by 'real' academics while at the same time writing in a style that is not easily accessible to a popular audience. His thesis is that the 'war' was primarily a media event that was useful in different ways to both sides of the conflict. He does not dispute that violence and suffering took place, but suggests that the event was not a war as was defined in the past by Clausewitz. Any review that states he is trying to 'hide' the essential suffering of those at the ground of the event is just wrong. There is nothing in the book that questions or calls into doubt the experiences of soldiers or civilians; at the same time it does not dwell upon them.
Opinion never constitutes reality!.......2006-03-16
My! And yes of course he must be right! It never ceases to amaze me how 'self aggrandized' intellectuals can sit back (in the relative safety of their ivory towers) and tell themselves 'stories' generated from their own imaginations, conclusions or biases. Unfortunately they often portray these self conjured stories or opinions as reality. Equally amusing is that there are always those (safely out of harms way as well) who are quick to conclude that the opinions of someone with 'credentials' are indeed actual fact, and that of course, the U.S. Government in particular, is corrupt. After all, we all need a good `hate target' to satisfy our own needs of self righteousness. So we might as well pick the biggest target we can find, right? As someone who has been involved in the global intelligence equation for a number of years, I would conclude that any rational human being capable of thought, would agree that "All Governments" on this planet are corrupt . . . without exception. That corruption would be most readily recognized as self-serving agendas of leaders, want-to-be's, and in many cases the religious power mongers, and even the people, for power, wealth, control, fame, notoriety, etc. etc.. (Sound anything like real life?) Any way, I still applaud the writer in his ability to make a few bucks on his `fantasy' work, and it is very well written.
So what?.......2004-04-29
Yeah, so there was a lot of tv coverage of the Gulf War. Yeah, so some people confuse the tv coverage with what actually went on to the point where the real war is irrelevant. Yeah, so there is a level on which there is a war for public opinion, a purely media war. Beaudrillard says all of this in the tortured language of continental philosophy. Since I love continental philosophy, I appreciate the points he makes about images and simulacra. But he offers not the slightest recognition of the fact that the war DID take place, people, animals, and buildings were destroyed, money and years of work erased, longlasting suffering and illness a legacy among all countries involved . And for that reason, this book made me VERY angry.
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place........2001-07-27
No one can lack commonsense as much as an intellectual, especially a leftist one, and perhaps most of all a renowned French professor of sociology. To show his brilliance, Baudrillard takes a perfectly obvious fact and devotes a book to proving it wrong. In saying that the Kuwait war "did not take place," he means that the fighting was so lopsided, it did not constitute a war. Brushing aside American fears of heavy casualties, he deems that the war "was won in advance." It was, in his view, "a shameful and pointless hoax, a programmed and melodramatic version of what was the drama of war." From the American point of view, he claims, "no accidents occurred in this war, everything unfolded according to a programmatic order." In all, the events of early 1991 stood in relation to war as computer erotics do to actual sex.
Baudrillard's exceedingly slight essay (a compilation of three articles published in the newspaper Libération) ceaselessly hammers away at these themes. He stands midway between the United States and Iraq, faulting each of these main actors about equally. For him, it is all aesthetics and ideology; the deeply important human, economic, and strategic issues raised by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait disappear under the weight of his relentless abstraction. Thus unconnected from reality, Baudrillard mangles everything from the French president's name to the number of traffic fatalities in the United States. The result is a book of profound error and transcendent stupidity, the most inane ever reviewed in these pages.
Middle East Quarterly, March 1996
Pure sociological poetry.......2000-11-05
A brilliant response to the mediated non-event of the Gulf War - a must read for anyone with lingering illusions on the nature of war in the unipolar post-Cold War world in which media war has eclipsed war itself and Clauswitz's definition fails to find resonance
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Seduction (CultureTexts)
Jean Baudrillard
Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0312052944 |
Customer Reviews:
A Seducing Book.......2000-06-05
In this book, Baudrillard develops his own theory in various fields from sex, Freud, Kierkegaard, to politics in the theme of gseductionh. Probably, this book is written to be seduction. At the same time, we can see Baudrillardfs general attitude toward his works including this book: Prediction, warning, and seduction. He seems to learn a lot of things from Kierkegaardfs works. In the first part, he maintains his own theory on sex against Freud, which is different from feministsf theory based on sexual difference. It is interesting that he almost predicts todayfs situation of sex, which is why his works always seduce people. Moreover, I am impressed by his comments on Japanese striptease and by his idea that Japanese sexual culture is different from Western one. Through chapters, his point that seduction is fatal to itself appears continuously in his skillful rhetoric: The style of this book is similar to his gSimulacra and Simulationh, which is a good guidebook to read this book.
Average customer rating:
- More Nonsense
- The Spectacle is Real: Enantiodromia
- Don't have to buy it. Read it at a bookstore
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The Spirit of Terrorism: And Requiem for the Twin Towers
Jean Baudrillard
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
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ASIN: 1859844111 |
Book Description
In dealing all the cards to itself, the system forced the Other to change the rules of the game. And the new rules are ferocious, because the game is ferocious.
We have seen many world events, and recent years have been filled with any number of violent ones, from wars to genocides. But until September 11 we had had no symbolic event on a world scale that marked a setback for globalization itself. With the terrorist attacks we are confronted, says Baudrillard, with the pure event that concentrates in itself all the events which have never taken place. And we had all dreamt of this event because it was impossible not to dream of the destruction of American monopolistic power.
Continuing an analysis developed over many years, Baudrillard sees the power of the terrorists as lying in the symbolism of this slaughter. Not merely the reality of death, but a sacrificial death that challenges the whole system. Where the past revolutionary sought to conduct a struggle of real forces in the context of ideology and politics, the new terrorist mounts a powerful symbolic challenge, which, when combined with high-tech resources, constitutes an unprecedented assault on an over-sophisticated, vulnerable West.
'There is,' writes Baudrillard, 'no solution to this extreme situation.' As a response to it, conventional warfare is a non-starter, a non-event. It is merely 'the continuation of an absence of politics by other means.'
<B>About the series</B>: Appearing on the first anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, these series of books from Verso present analyses of the United States, the media, and the events surrounding September 11 by Europe's most stimulating and provocative philosophers. Probing beneath the level of TV commentary, political and cultural orthodoxies, and 'rent-a-quote' punditry, Baudrillard, Virilio, and Zizek offer three highly original and readable accounts that serve as fascinating introductions to the direction of their respective projects, and as insightful critiques of the unfolding events. This series seeks to comprehend the philosophical meaning of September 11 and will leave untouched none of the prevailing views currently propagated.
Customer Reviews:
More Nonsense.......2003-11-12
More postmodern nonsense from one of the usual suspects, the fellow who brought us "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place." As usual, the most craven appeasement is dressed up as some sort of profound philosophy. I wonder if it were Baudrillard's relatives who were murdered whether he'd be so quick to conclude that it is useless to fight back. But I fear the answer would be the same. God help the West if this is what we've come to. Is there anything we're willing to fight for?
The Spectacle is Real: Enantiodromia.......2003-06-24
Jean Baudrillard, perhaps the most aphoristic and clear writing (if not necessarily the most profound) of the postmodernists here wields his phallic pen to cut to the core of the twin tower destruction at the hands of Bin Ladenýs terrorists. He argues, straightforwardly and convincingly, that the power of terrorism is not contained by its Islamic wielders, but is also a kind of global self-destruction of the globalized American superpower. Anyone could recognize that media and imagery were at the heart of the terror in Manhattaný-that part of the terror was the effective use, far out of proportion to the expenditure made, of comandeering the media to call attention (e.g., the police prefix date, 911) to itself and the helplessness of a crisis for which there is no effective solution. As Baudrillard points out, calling the suicides "cowards" only underscored the inability to answer this realized desire to humiliate "civilization" (what has become of civilization) on the part of those who were willing to put their own death into play. Baudrillard cites Nietzsche with regard to martyrdom being the enemy of truth but in the same breath demonstrates that the terrorists' goal is not a final solution via biological or nuclear warfare so much as a confrontation, a dual that will make the west lose face. He suggests that WW III indeed already happened: it was the cold war. And that now we are in the midst of WW IV which is an anitbody-like reaction of Orwellian globalization against itself. He identifies terror with evil which he suggests tends to exist precisely in the fading of the boundaries between good and evil. An interesting analysis that never mentions, but links to the concept of "enantiodromia"ý-adopting the enemies tactics to defeat them. The Israelis did this in becoming nationalistic and materialistic to adopt a state, and the terrorists do it in using the media and its imagery to stage what amounts to a bad Hollywood movie whose extra horror owes to the fact that the spectacle is real.
Don't have to buy it. Read it at a bookstore.......2003-03-11
Short, easy to understand. Good enough not to miss it, but not good enough to own it.
After you read this essay, you will breifly grasp the ideas of why 'fight fire with fire,'which is the current policy on terrorism of the Bush government, will never work to fight against terrorism. Also you may find that collapsed twin towers not only represent the loss of economic Babel tower, but the failure of nostalgic fantasy of globalization in digital-information era.
If you have some time, go to local ..., and check out this interesting short essay. You will finish it before you finish Starbucks coffee. =)
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