Jean Baudrillard was born in Rheims, France in 1929 in a civil servant family. He taught German and then became a sociology professor at the University of Nanterre from the 1966 through 1987. His most famous works are For A Critique of The Political Economy of a Sign (1972), The Mirror of Production (1975), Simulacres et Simulation (1981), America (1986) The Ecstasy of Communication (1988) and the controversial The Gulf War did not take place (1995). In France, Baudrillard is a public intellectual, who makes pronouncements on current phenomena and is regarded by some as a postmodern guru – like McLuhan in the 1960s (Gingrich 2000).

He belongs to the famous pleiad of eminent thinkers that includes Barthes, Foucault, Derrida and other philosophers of poststructuralist school. He started as a New Left, influenced by Marx, Freud, Marcuse and gradually became one of the most outstanding critics of left wing.

Prior to introduction of Baudrillard’s thoughts, I’ll present some important thinkers who influenced him. First of all, Roland Barthes, whose “Mythologies” analyzed advertising, fashion and other popular culture as systems of signs. Another sources of Baudrillard’s philosophy were Lacan’s psychoanalysis, Saussure’s structural linguistics and Derrida’s deconstruction. All those theories focused on everyday life and importance of discourses, codes and culture in it.

According to Saussure, sign is a complex of signifier (the word “dog”), signified (the idea of dog) and referent (concrete dog). On Saussure’s theory, meaning was not determined by referring language to the world; rather, language was viewed as independent system with its own logic, structure and rules of signification (Kellner 1989, 3).

Baudrillard’s early works focus on “consumer society” and semiological analysis of value. From the mid 1970s, however, his primary topics become simulation and simulacra, media, information, science and new technology. Altogether they produce what Baudrillard called ‘implosion’ and ‘hyperreality.’ (Kellner 1989, 60).
Baudrillard’s first book devoted to media and technology was Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976). He proclaimed “the end of labor.

The end of production. The end of political economy” (Kellner 1989, 61) and pointed out that in the new society media and technologies will replace production as the organizing principle of the society. By Baudrillard’s expression, the mode of production yields the primary function in society to the code of production (Kellner 1989, 62).

Wages bear no relation to person’s work; rather it’s the status of belonging to the system, the sign that person is playing the game. His concept doesn’t specify economic forces or social groups behind this process, his model is a sort of technological determinism whereby models and codes become the primary determinants of social reality.

In 1967 Baudrillard wrote a review of McLuhan’s “Understanding Media” where he criticized Canadian from Marxist standpoint. In later work Toward a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972) Baudrillard begins to distance from Marx and criticize attempts to create social theories of media.

He writes that mass media “are anti-mediatory and intransitive” (Kellner 1989, 67), emphasizing that media are unable to maintain two-way communication. Sometimes Baudrillard even calls for deconstruction of media, as neo-Luddite: because of mediated communication (even though communication is never immediate but performed through signs, language & etc.). Proliferation of signs (created by media) leads to collapse of meaning and destruction of distinctions between media and reality. Masses, according to Baudrillard, absorb and neutralize all media content what erodes the boundaries between reality and media; he suggests that we cannot say anymore what effects the media have on the masses and vice versa.

Using McLuhan’s scheme ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media, Baudrillard writes that media take ‘hot’ events like football games, war & etc. and transform them into ‘cool’ media events. So, this is the sort of involving people in the flat one-dimensional media experience instead of active participation in social life. TV viewers perceive media events more vividly than real ones.

One of the central categories in Baudrillard’s discourse is simulacrum, first appeared in Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) and developed in Simulations (1983). Simulacra, according to Baudrillard, are ‘”reproductions of objects or events” (Kellner 1989, 78).

He reviews the epoche of Renessaince with its hierarchy of signs of class, rank and social position (‘first order’ of simulacra, according to Baudrillard) and argues that ‘second order’ of simulacra appeared during the industrial revolution. Production became mechanized and turned out series of mass objects. ‘Third order’ of simulacra is our times; models are prevalent over the things, and simulation reaches its maximum. In brief, all three orders could be described in following table:

Table 1. The Wholly Trinity of Revolutions

Counterfeit	Production	Simulation
Renaissance	Industrial Revolution	Bauhaus
natural laws	forces/tensions	binary oppositions
metaphysics of being	metaphysics of energy/determination	metaphysics of indeterminacy/the code
tradition	avant-garde	mass culture
Shakespeare	Brecht/Jarry	Warhol
meaning is fixed	logic of equivalence	logic of ambivalence/reversibility
magic/sacrilege	revolution	catastrophe
caste	class	mass
sign = referent	sign exchanged for referent	sign exchanged for sign
religion	labor power	code
God/nature	ideology	simulacra

Source: Attias, 1996

His concept of hyperreality is just another form of showing what simulation is. Hyperreal means ‘more than real,’ or ‘that which is already reproduced’ (vs. real as ‘that which is possible to give an equivalent reproduction’ (Kellner 1989, 82). Disneyland is the example of ‘real’ country; it is not a fake but rather ‘third order’ of simulacra, the evidence of the fact that all America “is no longer real but of the order of the hyperreal and simulation… It is meant to be infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are everywhere, particularly amongst those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness” (Kellner 1989, 82). This concept of hyperreality is considered one of the first prophecies of cyber era with its ‘virtual reality’ (Nunes 1995).

Baudrillard apply his semiological methods for analysis of social issues. The example of refusal of the French to participate to demonstrate against extradition of German lawyer when an important soccer match was on television he viewed as the evidence that era of ‘social’ is over. Masses are no longer a referent (in terms of semiotics), they don’t express themselves, they are surveyed (Kellner 1989, 85). This ambivalence and indifference is just the reaction of masses on proliferation of media communication; being suspicious to messages and manipulation, masses prefer not to act.

Gulf War as it was shown on TV was the perfect Baudrillardian simulacrum, a hyperreal scenario in which events lose their identity and signifiers fade into one another (Patton 1995, 2). Not only coverage this war which was definitely fake and Hollywood-based but also usage of technologies was the evidence of simulate character of that war (electronic warfare & etc). Finally, the outcome of the war (Saddam remains the Iraqi dictator) shows that this war was just a simulation.

In his later essays and interviews about Internet Baudrillard remains skeptic about new media, emphasizing the point that communication is simulated rather then immediate (Baudrillard 1996). In this point he consider himself Rousseauiste and argues that science and technology maintains the system of codes, ‘third order of simulacra.’ In his model technology doesn’t drive the society; he is rather technological indeterminist, arguing that ‘The mass and the media are one single process. Mass(age) is the message.’(Kellner 1989, 87).

REFERENCES

Attias, Ben. 1996. Caution: Objects in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear. Article on-line. Available from http://www.csun.edu/~hfspc002/baud/index.html (accessed on March 30, 2003).
Baudrillard, Jean. 1996. Baudrillard on the New Technologies:
An interview with Claude Thibaut. Article on-line. Available from http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/newtech.html (accessed on March 29, 2003).
Gingrich, Paul. 2000. Baudrillard. Article on-line. Available from http://uregina.ca/~gingrich/a600.htm (accessed on March 28, 2003).
Kellner, Douglas. 1989. Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Nunes, Mark. 1995. Baudrillard in Cyberspace: Internet, Virtuality, and Postmodernity. Article on-line. Available from http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/cyberspace_internet_virtuality_postmodernity.html (accessed on March 28, 2003).
Patton, Paul. 1995. “The Gulf War did not take place: Introduction”, in The Gulf War did not take place, by Baudrillard, Jean, 1-21. Bloomington&Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.