Baudrillard Dead
I read over at schizzes and flows that Jean Baudrillard died.
It's a tight race between him and Derrida for first theorist to ever just plain blow my mind. I have a Ph.D. in large part because of Simulacra and Simulation.
R.I.P.
Labels: obits
posted by Lance @ 5:22 PM
1 Comments:
Little late on this comment, but here goes anyway.
I'm very much with you as you reflect fondly on S and S. Great book. Problematic, yeah. But great. I showed 2 or 3 clips from The Matrix today in the network culture course I'm teaching and was both amazed and a bit saddened by their significance. I know Baudrillard criticized that film for what he saw as a perversion of his ideas, but that aside there's something remarkable about the fact that such ideas found their ways into big-budget Hollywood.
During our discussion, my students rightly zeroed in on the film's technological determinism, and I have to admit this sort of "postmodern depair" underwrites much of Baudrillard's work. Still, if nothing else (and for record I think there's a lot else) Baudrillard provided us a lens and a series of concepts to begin reading and making sense of the postmodern condition. It's up to us, following his lead, to decide how best to proceed with these concepts...
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