"It is the terrorist model," he wrote, "to bring about an excess of reality, and have the system collapse beneath that excess." Baudrillard called it "the ultimate event, the mother of all events". Eventually the strike was broken by the attacks on the US of September 11 2001. In 1986 he moved from Nanterre, which had, he lamented, become "normalised", to the university of Paris-IX Dauphine.īaudrillard characterised the 1990s, with its wishful illusions about the "end of history", as a "stagnant" period in which events were on strike. The 1981 volume Simulacra and Simulation (the book that later appeared in The Matrix) gained a wide audience, and Baudrillard soon found himself a globetrotting academic superstar, discoursing on his themes of "seduction" (the term that escapes the binary opposition of "production" and "destruction") and "hyper-reality" (the simulated realm that is "more real than the real"). During this period, he also wrote on art and architecture for the journal Utopie. In subsequent works, including The Consumer Society (1970), The Mirror of Production (1973), and Forget Foucault (1977), Baudrillard developed arguments about the increasing power of the "object" over the "subject" in modern society, and the way in which protest and resistance were increasingly absorbed and turned into fuel by the symbolic "system" of capitalism. With the sociologist Henri Lefebvre and the cultural critic Roland Barthes as his intellectual mentors, he gave sharp, ironic readings of interior-design materials, gadgets, washing powder and other everyday phenomena. (Baudrillard later said he "participated" in the student revolts.) That same year, his first book, The System of Objects, was published. In 1966, Baudrillard joined the University of Nanterre, a small, fiercely radical institution that was to become notable as the incubator of the Mouvement du 22 Mars and its subsequent role in the évènements of May 1968. In 1956 he began teaching German at a French lycée, and in the early 1960s published essays on literature for the journal Les Temps Modernes, as well as translating works of Bertolt Brecht and Peter Weiss. He was the first of his family to go to university, studying German at the Sorbonne in Paris, and he later said that this led to a break with his family and cultural milieu. His grandparents were peasants and his parents became civil servants. The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce."īaudrillard was born in the cathedral town of Reims in north-eastern France. He later protested wryly that The Matrix had got him wrong: "The most embarrassing part of the film is that the new problem posed by simulation is confused with its classical, Platonic treatment. Hacker hero Neo (Keanu Reeves) hides his contraband software in a hollowed-out copy of one of the philosopher's books, and rebel chief Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) quotes Baudrillard's most famous formula: "Welcome to the desert of the real."īaudrillard was invited to collaborate on the sequels, but declined. Pop culture paid tribute to Baudrillard's prescience in Andy and Larry Wachowski's 1999 film The Matrix, about a near-future Earth where human society is a simulation designed by malign machines to keep us enslaved. He thus anticipated, by a decade or two, later arguments about the nature of "virtual reality". Such had been Baudrillard's name for the defining problem of the age since the 1970s, when he wrote that the Marxian problem of class struggle had been replaced, in the "post-industrial" era, with the problem of simulation. The real violence was thoroughly overwritten by electronic narrative: by simulation. Rehearsed as a wargame or simulation, it was then enacted for the viewing public as a simulation: as a news event, with its paraphernalia of embedded journalists and missile's-eye-view video cameras, it was a videogame. Yet Baudrillard was pointing out that the war was conducted as a media spectacle.
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