The post-structural theorist, cultural critic, and photographer Jean Baudrillard died yesterday after a long illness. He was 77.
Baudrillard was a post-modern thinker who inspired the ideas behind the movie The Matrix. His thoughts about hyper-reality forged the notion of virtual reality and launched an entire sub-genre of science fiction.
His simulacra theory speculated that people do not live in reality but in a world manufactured by mass media, the simulacrum. This lead him to pronounce that the first Gulf War was not real. It was produced as a sort of virtual video game for TV watchers in the west.
Two years ago he told the New York Times: “All our values are simulated! What is freedom at all? A choice between purchasing one or another car? This is only the simulation of freedom.”
His dense, translated-from-French prose were not always the easiest to read and some of the ideas seemed bizarre, but they were intoxicating, just as the ideas of Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan were a generation before.
Baudrillard's passing is marked here as he was an influence on this typist's typing.
2 comments:
There are times when I feel that Baudrillard, Hooks and Habermaas were lodgers atr my house ... thus is the burden of the partner of a post-modernist feminist scholar ... but I must say, it's been yes wide open since!!! A sad day, but a legacy to be savoured!!
weelll...I had a fondness for him..but truth to tell I only read him in the comic book series -can't remember the name of the series--it may be Baudrillard for Dummies (Morons?). But what do I know--just a lower class Usian.
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