Jean Baudrillard

# Key points in biography

Jean Baudrillard was born in Reims, in France, in 1929. He taught language at a provincial lycee before he moved into sociology. He completed his thesis at the Nanterre university in Paris in 1966 and stayed there to teach until he retired in 1987 in order to concentrate on his writing.

# Contributions to Sociology

In his books Baudrillard draws on a rich tradition of thinkers, synthesizing their theories and building his own, very radical and controversial theory on theirs. Among other books all looking at this issue, in *The Consumer Society*, Baudrillard paints a picture of Western consumer society in which symbolic meanings and relationships are reduced to and transformed into 'semiotic' elements. These elements are then combined to produce something he calls sign-objects. These objects are organized into a structure controlled by a code of signification. Each sign is then unilaterally appropriated and consumed by its user for the respective cultural meaning it has for him. This, in Baudrillard's eyes authoritarian and totalizing language experience is contrasted by, what he called, the *symbolic*, alive and bilateral and an immediately actualized mode of relation.
Throughout his whole work, Baudrillard seeks to explore the development of the semiotic world and the semiotic experiences while he always seeks to uncover what symbolic tendencies remain that counter and subvert the semiotic.

He also draws a parallel between the semiotic development of language and the capitalist development of the economy. He criticizes both equally, saying that they base themselves on similar premises, the language on the pretense to be describing the 'real' and the economy on quantifying the 'use value'. Both concepts according to Baudrillard are illusory, since they do not exist objectively and independently from those codifying them. This led Baudrillard to expand hs concept of semiotics to the ultimate result, that semiotics as such are what determines what is real for the individual. He further developed this using the image of the 'simulacrum' a demonic image that takes force of the real and shapes it according to its wishes. He is inherently critical of how certain simulacra have taken to dominate life in the contemporary Western consumer society and how they achieve to pacify and thereby control people.

In his book *Shadow of the Silent Majorities*, Baudrillard focuses on the consequences of modernity. He postulates that eventually the overproduction, generalization and saturation of the social, information and meanings will lead to an implosion of these categories. The social is lost through the perpetuating of the simulacrum of the 'masses', which bear within it a critique of social sciences and their claim to objective and most of all quantifiable knowledge (a thing most certainly connected to 'the masses').

Baudrillard has been subjected to fierce criticism, especially because he is a radical theorist drawing from radical social theory tradition. He makes a lot of use of marginal theory and is an open anti-epmiricist. Nevertheless, (or maybe rather, because of that?), his contributions are immense and he has made and more advanced critical theory possible.

# References

1. ↑  Scott, John, 2007, *Fifty Key Sociologists: The Contemporary Theorists*, p. 14
2. ↑  Scott, John, 2007, *Fifty Key Sociologists: The Contemporary Theorists*, p. 14-17
3. ↑  Scott, John, 2007, *Fifty Key Sociologists: The Contemporary Theorists*, p. 17