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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 the dominant social value that produces social space.
Baudrillard thought that Lefebvre’s Marxist critique of life as everydayness had some merit but was insufficient and needed to be enhanced by a theory of signs — how words and symbols signify and represent meaning. Baudrillard accepted that signs are an integral part of society because they articulate social meanings and are organized into systems of meaning. He argued that commodities should be characterized not strictly through their use and exchange value, as Marx had said, but by their “sign-value”: what those objects signify and represent. For example, the value of a luxury watch lies more in its sign-value as an expression of prestige, wealth, and style than in its “use-value” as a timekeeping device or its monetary exchange value. In everyday life, people purchase and display their commodities as much for their sign-value as for their use-value. This insight from Baudrillard is even more true now…
