Baudrillard, Jean, 1929-2007

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), French sociologist, cultural critic, and theorist of postmodernity, was born in the northern town of Reims on the 27th of July 1929. The son of civil servants and the grandson of peasant farmers, he was the first in his family to attend university—eventually becoming a teacher of sociology at the Université de Paris X Nanterre and a leading intellectual figure of his time. Much of his early life and work was influenced by the French occupation of Algeria and the ensuing struggle for independence in the 1950s and 60s.

Before completing his doctoral thesis in sociology under the direction of Henri Lefebvre, Baudrillard taught German at several lycées in Paris and outside the city. Upon the successful completion of his dissertation in September 1966, he took a position in Nanterre—first as Maître Assistant (Assistant Professor), then Maître de Conférences (Associate Professor)—eventually becoming a professor after completing his habilitation with L'Autre par lui-même (The Other by Himself). He was associated with Roland Barthes, to whom his first book, a semiotic analysis of culture—Le système des objets (The System of Objects), 1968—is clearly indebted. In it, he "offers a cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society. Baudrillard classifies the everyday objects of the 'new technical order' as functional, nonfunctional and metafunctional. He contrasts 'modern' and 'traditional' functional objects, subjecting home furnishing and interior design to a celebrated semiological analysis. His treatment of nonfunctional or ‘marginal’ objects focuses on antiques and the psychology of collecting, while the metafunctional category extends to the useless, the aberrant and even the ‘schizofunctional.’ Finally, Baudrillard deals at length with the implications of credit and advertising for the commodification of everyday life." And what this system does is to transfer—exchange— meaning itself through the continual circulation of objects; thus, it is not just that use-value no longer matters but that what is exchanged is no longer the surplus of production but consumption itself—where the consumer (there are no longer even individuals) not only maintains the illusion of their personal meanings through this exchange but the illusion of use-value itself.

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