Jean Baudrillard
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Terror is as much a part of the concept of truth as runniness is of the concept of jam." --Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories "Just as Jarry sourced many figures from the work of Charles Vernon Boys, William Crookes and Sir William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Baudrillard dabbles in the writings of Benoit Mandelbrot and Jacques Monod. " --Baudrillard Dictionary (2010) by Richard G. Smith "Jean Baudrillard is a social theorist who has made his living explaining the emergence of mass culture and the increasing importance of social images as commodities -- very much in the vein of the Situationists. To get a feel for the Baudrillardian "social-image-as-a-commodity," consider the term "spin doctor," listen to Michael Jackson's lawyers, or examine the difference between a television commercial and a PBS "pledge break." Baudrillard talks about the regression of simulacra, the media hall-of- mirrors in which any reference to the actual disappears. Mick Jagger talked about the same thing 20 years ago in the film Performance, only he was in a bubble bath with the still-attractive Anita Pallenberg and an underage androgynous French Girl. Baudrillard isn't that much fun, though he's the most popular Trendy Frenchman with the college crowd." -- A User's Guide to Trendy French Intellectuals (1994) by R.U. Sirius |
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Jean Baudrillard (1929 – 2007) was a French philosopher known for books such as Seduction (1978), Simulacra and Simulation (1981), America (1986), and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991).
To 21st century American audiences, Baudrillard's work was best known by way of the popular sci-fi film The Matrix (1999) in which Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation was prominently featured. The protagonist of The Matrix, Neo, can be seen with a copy of Simulacra and Simulation. Another character, Morpheus refers to the real world outside of the Matrix as the "desert of the real", a direct reference to Baudrillard's work.
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