Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 11, 2007
The death Tuesday in Paris of French theoretician Jean Baudrillard prompted some unusual Internet postings, including "Baudrillard's Death Did Not Happen," "Jean Baudrillard did not take place," "Baudrillard did not exist" and "Jean Baudrillard is survived by his simulacrum."
These were, oddly enough, tributes, offered in the spirit of a guru of postmodern thought who exerted enormous influence on contemporary artists and writers, including the creators of "The Matrix" movies. The postings were plays on the claim Baudrillard, 77, had made about the Gulf War of 1991 — namely, that it "did not take place."
That war was, in his view, largely a television event, experienced by the masses more like a video game than an actual situation of violence and death. His assertion, infuriating to many, illustrated his big idea: that we no longer can distinguish between imitation and reality — and that we sometimes prefer the imitations because they seem more real than life.
This state of what Baudrillard called "hyperreality" explains why we are swamped by TV "reality shows," which are anything but. And it accounts for the perennial allure of Disneyland, which he said is "presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real."
Disneyland is what Baudrillard called a "simulacrum," a copy more perfect than the original, such as the replicants who cause havoc in the sci-fi film classic "Blade Runner" or the alternate universes depicted in the blockbuster "Matrix" movies. Asked once to describe himself, he said, "What I am, I don't know. I am the simulacrum of myself."
He makes somewhat of a cameo in the first "Matrix" film, when the character played by Keanu Reeves opens a copy of Baudrillard's seminal work, "Simulacra and Simulation," to reveal a hollow, which he uses to hide a stash of pirated computer disks. Moviegoers hip to Baudrillard loved the joke — phony disks in a phony book about modern society's inability to tell the phony from the real — but the theorist said the movie misinterpreted his ideas.
The movie nonetheless "transformed him," Larissa MacFarquhar wrote in a 2005 New Yorker story, "from a cult figure into an extremely famous cult figure." Its false representation of a theory about false representation made the irony dizzyingly complete.
A small, round man who was authentically French in his love of cigarettes and drinking wine at midday, Baudrillard was accustomed to having his theories mangled. His ideas, like those of fellow French intellectual Jacques Derrida, could be maddeningly dense.
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March 11, 2007
The death Tuesday in Paris of French theoretician Jean Baudrillard prompted some unusual Internet postings, including "Baudrillard's Death Did Not Happen," "Jean Baudrillard did not take place," "Baudrillard did not exist" and "Jean Baudrillard is survived by his simulacrum."
These were, oddly enough, tributes, offered in the spirit of a guru of postmodern thought who exerted enormous influence on contemporary artists and writers, including the creators of "The Matrix" movies. The postings were plays on the claim Baudrillard, 77, had made about the Gulf War of 1991 — namely, that it "did not take place."
That war was, in his view, largely a television event, experienced by the masses more like a video game than an actual situation of violence and death. His assertion, infuriating to many, illustrated his big idea: that we no longer can distinguish between imitation and reality — and that we sometimes prefer the imitations because they seem more real than life.
This state of what Baudrillard called "hyperreality" explains why we are swamped by TV "reality shows," which are anything but. And it accounts for the perennial allure of Disneyland, which he said is "presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real."
Disneyland is what Baudrillard called a "simulacrum," a copy more perfect than the original, such as the replicants who cause havoc in the sci-fi film classic "Blade Runner" or the alternate universes depicted in the blockbuster "Matrix" movies. Asked once to describe himself, he said, "What I am, I don't know. I am the simulacrum of myself."
He makes somewhat of a cameo in the first "Matrix" film, when the character played by Keanu Reeves opens a copy of Baudrillard's seminal work, "Simulacra and Simulation," to reveal a hollow, which he uses to hide a stash of pirated computer disks. Moviegoers hip to Baudrillard loved the joke — phony disks in a phony book about modern society's inability to tell the phony from the real — but the theorist said the movie misinterpreted his ideas.
The movie nonetheless "transformed him," Larissa MacFarquhar wrote in a 2005 New Yorker story, "from a cult figure into an extremely famous cult figure." Its false representation of a theory about false representation made the irony dizzyingly complete.
A small, round man who was authentically French in his love of cigarettes and drinking wine at midday, Baudrillard was accustomed to having his theories mangled. His ideas, like those of fellow French intellectual Jacques Derrida, could be maddeningly dense.
Read More...
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