Jean Baudrillard

1. Postmodern Theorist

2.  Baudrillard was a French sociologist and philosopher, born in 1929. He died in
May 2007 aged 77. As his parents were civil servants and his grandparents
peasant farmers, he was the first of his family to attend University.
 He spent a lot of his life teaching at either University or at a lycée (French
secondary school).
 Baudrillard published multiple books on his ideas and theories, and he was
regarded by some to be an ‘intellectual celebrity’.
 He is NOT a postmodernist.

3.  Baudrillard believes that nothing we experience is real. Everything we see is a
representation or ‘simulation’.
 We have come to a point where the representation or simulation of things replaces
the real. Therefore any new simulations are merely simulating a simulation. This
is what Baudrillard referred to as simulacra.
 Representations have replaced reality.
 We experience a simulation of reality.

4.  When the real still exists, we are able to measure the success of the simulation
against it.
 When we cannot see the real and all we see is the simulation, the simulation
becomes our reality.
 When there is no true reality, Baudrillard believes a ‘hyperreality’ will replace it.
 For example, many of us connect more deeply to film/TV, celebrities and virtual
reality (e.g. social networking – Facebook) than we do with real things.
"A real without origin or reality"-
Jean Baudrillard

5.  The film tells the story of a man falling in love with his operating system.
 This is a very obvious example of how we are able to connect with virtual reality
on a deeper level than reality itself. The voice of the operating system (Samantha)
is not a real person, yet the character is able to fall in love with it.

6.  “What is the real? How do you define the real?... The real is simply electrical
signals interpreted by your brain” (Morpheus, The Matrix)
 The Matrix embodies Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality, suggesting that life
itself is a hyperreality. It is a simulation within a computer program.

7. Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is
taken from us after our deaths to be developed
elsewhere and screened as our life story in some
infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the
sidereal void.

8. Baudrillard argues that America is a hyperreality.
“America is the original version of modernity. We
are the dubbed or subtitled version. America ducks
the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or
mythical authenticity; it has no past and no
founding truth. Having known no primitive
accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual
present.”
“Americans may have no identity, but they do have
wonderful teeth.”
“Life is cinema.”

9. Mark Poster
 “Baudrillard’s work is invaluable in beginning to comprehend the impact of new
communication forms on society.”
 However, “fails to define his major terms”.
 Critics of Baudrillard’s theories are often in strong disagreement with his remarks
about America, believing that he saw what he wanted to see to support his
theories.
“no culture here, no cultural discourses. No ministries, no commissions, no
subsidies, no promotion.” - Baudrillard