French philosopher Jean Baudrillard dies in Paris
Sun, 2007-03-18 00:03
#1
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard dies in Paris
Sun, 2007-03-18 00:03
#2
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The French philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard, died in Paris on March 6, 2007, aged 77. Baudrillard was one of the leading figures in the postmodernist school of thought and exerted considerable influence on French and international intellectual life.
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Any serious study of Baudrillard’s work inevitably leads to the conclusion that much of his writing is self-indulgent, often contradictory and occasionally utterly obscure. Nevertheless, there is a logical core to his argument, which also provides a basis for his appeal.
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Following the betrayal of the workers’ and student revolts by the French Communist Party, and the ebbing of a wave of radicalism across Europe, Baudrillard joined a growing number of French intellectuals who sought to rapidly ditch their radical pasts.
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In place of the production process and the analysis of the commodity that stood at the centre of Marx’s analysis of capitalism, Baudrillard elevates the role of consumption and the consumer in modern society.
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Baudrillard’s elevation of the role of consumption and the consumer in capitalism represents a direct attack on Marx’s conception. Marx had maintained an opposite point of view. While acknowledging the fundamental connection between production and consumption, Marx emphasised the decisive role of production.
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In addition to his emphasis on the primary role of consumption and the consumer, Baudrillard also challenged Marx’s analysis of the role of exchange in capitalist society.Once again, Baudrillard declares he can go one better and introduces a third form of exchange—symbolic exchange in the form of the sign. Baudrillard argues that in addition to the satisfaction of human needs, commodities can also provide social status—something of increasing value in modern society. This value is expressed in the form of the sign.
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According to Baudrillard in 1980, we are now (“willing”) victims in a postmodern world dominated by simulated experience and feelings, and have utterly lost the capacity to comprehend reality.
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Based on his interpretation of the omnipotence of bourgeois media outlets, Baudrillard predicted that the first Gulf War (1991) would not take place. During the course of the war, he maintained it was not really taking place. After its conclusion, he announced that it had not taken place. The appalling suffering endured by hundreds of thousands, as a consequence of the brutal US military offensive against Iraq, is dismissed by Baudrillard with a brush of the hand.In another text, Baudrillard describes Disneyland as the real America. In his opinion, American society is rushing to adapt and bring itself into line with the utopian vision of Disneyland. Gone are the divisions in a society wracked by enormous social polarisation. For the self-complacent and insulated Baudrillard, there are no poor or unemployed in America. Beneath the verbal veneer of Baudrillard’s self proclaimed “ultra-radical” critique of capitalism is the vision of an omnipotent society, largely free of class divisions, able to endlessly increase production and pacify the broad masses of the population through a combination of consumer goods and media and advertising propaganda
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In his book Fatal Strategies (1985), Baudrillard sneeringly derides the masses, who, he claims, in their brute, animal fashion are complicit in the strategy of the ruling elite: “They (the masses) are not at all an object of oppression and manipulation.... Atonal amorphous, abysmal, they exercise a passive and opaque sovereignty; they say nothing, but subtly, perhaps like animals in their brute indifference” (p. 94) “... the masses know that they are nothing and they have no desire to know. The masses know they are powerless, and they don’t want power” (p. 98).
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Baudrillard wilfully ignores the roles of political parties, tendencies and leaderships, preferring in these passages to give rein to his “playful” idiosyncrasy. If the masses exercise “sovereignty,” they cannot at the same time be “powerless,” but Baudrillard is oblivious of such contradictions in his own writing under conditions where so few of his contemporaries are prepared to point out that “the emperor has no clothes.”What does remain in these passages is Baudrillard’s contempt, revulsion and fear of the masses—sentiments shared by broad layers of former radicals who have been able to make highly remunerative careers during the past decades.
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In fact, along with his postmodernist fellow-thinkers, Baudrillard’s intellectual development can only be understood as a product of the long drawn-out degeneration of postwar Stalinism. Virtually every major figure associated with either French postmodernist trends of thought or the right-wing nouveaux philosophes spent some time inside, or at least sympathised with, either Stalinist/Maoist or other forms of left radical organisations in the 1960s.
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In the 1960s, a concerted ideological attack on Marxism was launched inside the French Communist Party by CP central committee member and the party’s leading intellectual, Louis Althusser. His revision of historical materialism was instrumental in the emergence of structuralist theorists who maintained that other factors, such as psychology or the distribution of power, were more important for the understanding of capitalist society than economic factors.After the Second World War, the man regarded by many as the grandfather or “pope” of postmodernism—Jean-Francois Lyotard—joined first of all the left radical organisation Socialism or Barbarism before breaking with it in 1964 to form his own organisation around a magazine called Workers Power. In 1966, he then broke with left politics altogether to concentrate on establishing the foundations for postmodernism.
It is from precisely this milieu, under conditions in which Stalinist dogma had blunted critical thought for decades, that figures such as Baudrillard could emerge and gain such influence in universities (and media editorial boards). The pervasive and negative influence of postmodernism and the work of thinkers such as Baudrillard are both an expression and a product of the complete degeneration of a broad layer of former radicals influenced by Stalinism.
The careful historical clarification of this process is fundamental for the revival of socialist ideas amongst broad layers of students and workers.
This is a critique by the wsws.org...What is your take on it???
Here is the link...
[url=http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/mar2007/baud-m17.shtml]http://www.wsws...
Sun, 2007-03-18 04:53
#3
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Originally posted by trippie:
[b]The pervasive and negative influence of postmodernism and the work of thinkers such as Baudrillard are both an expression and a product of the complete degeneration of a broad layer of former radicals influenced by Stalinism. [...]This is a critique by the wsws.org...What is your take on it???[/b]
I thought it was really long.
I also thought accusing a dude who just died of "complete degeneration" could be construed as bad taste.
Sun, 2007-03-18 05:28
#4
N.Beltov
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unionist: I also thought accusing a dude who just died of "complete degeneration" could be construed as bad taste.
Perhaps the reviewer had recently read Edgar Allen Poe's [i]The Facts in the Case of M.Valdemar[/i] and was overly influenced by Poe's gruesome masterpiece.
FYI, Poe's short story reviews the case of an individual who, allegedly, arranged to have himself hypnotized shortly before his death. The body does not rot away at all. Instead, a zombie-like existence is forced upon the recently departed. The dead man begs to be released from his "spell" ... and when he is, um, released, the body [i]rots away rapidly before the eyes of the horrified onlookers[/i] into a disgusting, gelatinous mass of stinking putrefaction.
But then, Poe did always have a way with words. He he.
Sun, 2007-03-18 09:48
#5
[url=http://www.theglobalgame.com/blog/?p=243]Baudrillard on football:[/url]
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Baudrillard devotes a chapter, “The Mirror of Terrorism,” to the deaths of 39 Italian spectators at Heysel Stadium in Brussels before a 1985 European Cup final between Juventus and Liverpool. As one might expect from an original, not a derivative, thinker, Baudrillard connects the behavior of Liverpool supporters, blamed for attacking the Italian fans before collapse of a perimeter wall led to the deaths and hundreds of injured, to seemingly unrelated social and political data: to the “state terrorism” of Margaret Thatcher’s England that, in its crushing of miners’ strikes in the north and disregard for fundaments of working-class life, including football, created pre-conditions for such violence.Baudrillard does not absolve Liverpool fans of blame or deny the reality of the suffering, but looks at a bigger frame. He sees the violent urges of the spectators, cut off from practical means of changing their situation (“no longer participants in their own lives,” in one of Hussey’s phrases), as an inevitable consequence of wishing to become an actor in life. The stage, naturally, must be one of the mass-scale “pseudo-events,” the Liverpool fans’ actions turned into simulacra, given “worldwide currency by television, and in the process turned into a travesty of itself.” Baudrillard continues in The Transparency of Evil:
“How is such barbarity possible in the late twentieth century?” This is a false question. There is no atavistic resurgence of some archaic type of violence. This violence of old was both more enthusiastic and more sacrificial than ours. Today’s violence, the violence produced by our hypermodernity, is terror. A simulacrum of violence, emerging less from passion than from the screen: a violence in the nature of the image.
Four pages later, Baudrillard contrasts the events at Heysel with a match more than two years later. Real Madrid and Napoli contested an early-round European tie in 1987 within a nearly empty Estadio Santiago Bernabйu. Madrid fans were barred due to earlier transgressions. The scenario is familiar to us in the present, the death of a policeman amid fan rioting in Sicily in early February, for example, having persuaded Italian authorities to stage numerous matches within silent grounds. Events such as Heysel lead, in Baudrillard’s thought, to “terroristic hyperrealism,” in which “real” events occur in a vacuum, with no witnesses, but broadcast on massive screens. Baudrillard would draw heavy criticism for applying a similar course of thought to the first Gulf War in 1991, which he said “did not take place,” except as media event. With regard to football, Baudrillard continues:
"This phantom football match should obviously be seen in conjunction with the Heysel Stadium game, when the real event, football, was once again eclipsed—on this occasion by a much more dramatic form of violence. There is always the danger that this kind of transition may occur, that spectators may cease to be spectators and slip into the role of victims or murderers, that sport may cease to be sport and be transformed into terrorism: that is why the public must simply be eliminated, to ensure that the only event occurring is strictly televisual in nature. Every real referent must disappear so that the event may become acceptable on television’s mental screen."
Sun, 2007-03-18 10:05
#6
A complex, interesting thinker. Will be missed.
Sun, 2007-03-18 12:28
#7
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Once again, Baudrillard declares he can go one better and introduces a third form of exchange—symbolic exchange in the form of the sign. Baudrillard argues that in addition to the satisfaction of human needs, commodities can also provide social status—something of increasing value in modern society. This value is expressed in the form of the sign.
What did he mean by "the sign"?. I still prefer Polanyi's explanation. Man's economy is embedded in his social relationships. We don't value stuff nearly as much as we do people and our social relationships with them. In fact, manufacturing more stuff is a dead end for humanity. Oil-based economy with all its plastic widgets and pouring pollution into the air every year is causing increased rates of cancer. The Candian Cancer society says one in two Canadians will develop cancer in the next generation.
Baudrillard talks about betrayal in the French communist party. And yet, the protests in Paris had something that was different to the protests in the U.S., a link between a political left and protesting students and workers. Even with the string of rightist governments in France to 1980, French workers made gains that American workers did not. Paris protests caused DeGaulle to wonder about loyalty of French troops in Germany at the time. Of course, the right took public protests a little more seriously during the cold war than now. Capitalism is fascism with the mask on.
Thu, 2007-03-22 09:10
#8
Perhaps his death never took place?