Jean Baudrillard: Postmodernism’s Prophet
We aren’t living in a simulation, we have become a simulation.
Follow-up to
France was the hotbed of postmodernism from the 1960s through the 1980s, and one prominent postmodernist was Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007). Baudrillard (bo-dree-AR) could be classified more as a social critic than as a philosopher. He based his philosophy on the life of signs and how technology affects people and society. In three books, The System of Objects (1968), The Consumer Society (1970), and For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972), Baudrillard combined the philosophy of semiology with the critique of everyday life offered by French sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991). Lefebvre (le-FEV), a Marxist, argued that capitalism had colonized everyday life and had turned it into a zone of consumption, pushing people to believe that they needed to relieve the boredom of everydayness through purchasing products or experiences. Lefebvre had also shown how space is a complex social construction based on social values, and he considered capitalism to be…
