Introduction
Jean Baudrillard (/; 27 July 1929 – 6 March 2007) was a French
sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and
photographer. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture,
and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as
simulation and hyperreality. He wrote about diverse subjects, including
consumerism, gender relations, economics, social history, art, Western foreign
policy, and popular culture. Among his best known works are Simulacra and
Simulation (1981), America (1986), and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991).
His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically
post-structuralism.
Simulacra and
Simulation
As he developed his work throughout the 1980s, he moved from economic
theory to mediation and mass communication. Although retaining his interest in
Saussurean semiotics and the logic of symbolic exchange (as influenced by
anthropologist Marcel Mauss), Baudrillard turned his attention to the work of
Marshall McLuhan, developing ideas about how the nature of social relations is
determined by the forms of communication that a society employs. In so doing,
Baudrillard progressed beyond both Saussure's and Roland Barthes's formal
semiology to consider the implications of a historically understood version of
structural semiology.
Simulation, Baudrillard claims, is the current stage of the simulacrum:
all is composed of references with no referents, a hyperreality. Progressing
historically from the Renaissance, in which the dominant simulacrum was in the
form of the counterfeit—mostly people or objects appearing to stand for a real
referent (for instance, royalty, nobility, holiness, etc.) that does not exist,
in other words, in the spirit of pretense, in dissimulating others that a
person or a thing does not really "have it"—to the Industrial
Revolution, in which the dominant simulacrum is the product, the series, which
can be propagated on an endless production line; and finally to current times,
in which the dominant simulacrum is the model, which by its nature already
stands for endless reproducibility, and is itself already reproduced.
Hyperreality
In semiotics and postmodernism, hyperreality is an inability of
consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially
in technologically advanced postmodern societies. Hyperreality is seen as a
condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended
together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the
other begins. It allows the co-mingling of physical reality with virtual
reality (VR) and human intelligence with artificial intelligence (AI).
Individuals may find themselves, for different reasons, more in tune or
involved with the hyperreal world and less with the physical real world. Some
famous theorists of hyperreality/hyperrealism include Jean Baudrillard, Albert
Borgmann, Daniel J. Boorstin, Neil Postman and Umberto Eco.
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