Category: Jean Baudrillard

  • The Third Order of Simulacra: Simulation and Hyperreality

    The third order of simulacra in Baudrillard’s genealogy is also known as simulation: the system of objects, the consumer society, the system of models and series, simulated differences generated by “the code,” the post-World War II era of media, shopping mall architectures, and the American way of life.

  • The Controversy Around Baudrillard

    Baudrillard is highly controversial as a thinker. His work has had as many detractors as it has had enthusiasts. Some of his critics absurdly even accused him of celebrating the postmodern media-cultural condition of simulacra and semiotic signs becoming increasingly autonomous and detached from the “referents” of which they were supposed to be the representations.

  • Early Baudrillard

    The postmodern recombinant culture of cyber-commodities is a system of simulated differences or differences-in-sameness. The sign-object takes on its meaning in a system of marginal or minimal differences from other sign-objects, according to a code of hierarchical significations (Coke and Pepsi, McDonalds and Burger King, the subset of formula-generated episodes of a TV series).

  • Baudrillard’s Importance for the Future

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  • Jean Baudrillard and Consumer Objects

    Baudrillard sets out in his first book to “classify a world of objects.” He wants to go beyond a strictly “technological” analysis of how ordinary objects are intended – by the companies that manufacture them – to operate and to be used. He will instead study the “directly experienced psychological and sociological reality of objects.”

  • Jean Baudrillard and America

    America is no mere impressionistic travelogue, but rather a witty and serious interpretation of American democracy and capitalism today, based on a synthesis of political ideas drawn from many different currents of contemporary thought, notably including left-wing neo-Marxism and right-wing entrepreneurial libertarianism.