Introducing Baudrillard: A Graphic Guide

323 Pages·2015·42.39 MB·English

by  Chris Horrocks

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road,
London N7 9DP
Email: [email protected]
www.introducingbooks.com

ISBN: 978-184831-984-4
Text copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd Illustrations copyright © 2012 Icon
Books Ltd The author and illustrator has asserted their moral rights Originating
editor: Richard Appignanesi No part of this book may be reproduced in any
form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Jean Baudrillard – Con? Icon? Iconoclast?
Background… Algeria, Existentialism, Marxism
Revolution in Everyday Life
Mass Consumption
Structuralism
1968 Situationism
Situationist Graffiti
Repressive Participation
Affluent Society
Sign Network
The Critic as Consumer
Defining the Ambient Consumer
Applying Semiology
Semiology of Fashion
Classifying Consumers
Sign Function of Objects
The Field of Connotation
Crazy Consumers?
Regressing with Consumer Objects
The Fun System
Logic of the Consumer Object
Symbolic Exchange
The 1970s – Baudrillard Unmasks the Sign
Commodity and Sign
The Innocence of Use Value
The Mask of “Use Value”
Does Ideology Reflect Reality?
The Reply of Structural Linguistics
Is the “Sun” Real?
Déconstruction… against “Presence”
… and Différence
Baudrillard’s Culture
Simulations
Mass Reproduction… and Non-Auratic Culture
Lowest Common Culture
The Frankfurt School vs. Mass Culture
The Techno Culture…
… or Cyberblitz
Fashion Alibis
And Gadgets?
Banking on Galleries
What is a “True” Work of Art?
The Genealogy of Art’s Disappearance
The Beaubourg Effect
1973 – Baudrillard Destroys Marxism
And Psychoanalysis? And Nature?
“The Accursed Share”
The Myths of “Primitivism”
The Slave and Wage Worker
Lacant’s Mirror
Baudrillard – A Ladies’ Man?
Foucault’s Idea of Power
Male vs. Female
The Disaster of Liberation
Against Feminism
Seduction vs. Production
The End of Phallocracy?
Games of Seduction
Appearances vs. Reality
Sentimental Cannibalism
Baudrillard and Simulation
1. Symbolic Order in cultures of scarcity…
2. First Order of Simulacra
Examples of the Counterfeit
3. Second Order of Simulacra
4. Third Order of Simulacra
The Real – Simulation’s Alibi?
Disneyland or Baudrillard?
Watergate
The Bomb that Destroyed Reality
The Panic Crash
No Nukes
The Reality Gulf
Baudrillard and the Media
The Medium is the Model
Advertising – A Dead Language
Television
Reality Served Cold
The Silent Majority – Baudrillard and the Masses
TV and Class
Anti-Sociology
What has happened to society?
The Neutral Mass
The Silent Majority
Implosion
A World of Residues?
So where is politics today?
Baudrillard’s Fatal Decision
Fatal Extremes
Ecstasy
More Ecstasy …
The Obscene
Trans-Everything
Bio-Terminology: Hypertelia
Metastasis
Anomaly
Terrorism
Baudrillard and Nietzsche’s Superman?
Baudrillard on Tour…
USA
“The Desert of the Real”
Baudrillard Accused!
Baudrillard at The End of the World
What are we left with?
Postmodern Guru?
“The End” as Parody
Forget Baudrillard?
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Biographies
Index
Jean Baudrillard – Con? Icon?
Iconoclast?
As the Marxist critic Douglas Kellner said,
“The whole Baudrillard affair is rapidly mutating into a new idolatry of a
new master thinker, and is in danger of giving rise to a new orthodoxy”.
His theoretical position has radically altered over this time…
Jean BaudriIlard’s enormous output on mass consumption, media and society stretches from the political turbulence of 1960s France to the global vertigo of the 1990s.
…from early Marxist critiques of modern consumer culture and society, through a succession of skirmishes with psychoanalysis, sociology, semiology and Marxism itself, to his rejection of theory and
its replacement with an extreme “fatal” vision of the world.
Baudrillard is a contradictory character. The “real” Baudrillard was elusive-
almost secretive. In seminars he seemed passive and uncertain. Yet the “virtual”
Baudrillard is ferociously uncompromising — and his virulent style is met with
equal force by critics who accuse him of intolerance, banality, generalization and
facetiousness.
It’s not just his style they find irksome.
Baudrillard disturbs the theoretical foundations of academia, and intellectuals are wary of his popularity with the media. Academia questions his status as a “serious” intellectual.