Few philosophers get the book-to-movie treatment, and even fewer make it into blockbusters. Jean Baudrillard – a scholar whose simulation ideas inspired and appeared in The Matrix (1999)—is a rare exception. In one scene, Neo hides illegal software in a hollowed-out copy Simulacra and Simulations (1981). The buyer warns him as he hands it over: “This never happened. You don’t exist.” A more explicit reference was removed from an early draft of the script—a line that casts Baudrillard as some kind of prophet or god: “As in Baudrillard’s vision, your life is spent on a map, not within a territory.”
Of course, with popularity comes oversimplification. Baudrillard Thought The Matrix Making an “embarrassing mistake” in the ironic contrast between simulation and reality, he turned down an offer to serve as a “theoretical consultant” for the sequel. The art world’s adaptation, he argued, was even worse—at least that’s what Emmanuelle Fontaine and Blan Nicol argue in their slim new biography of the Frenchman.
It’s easy to see why artists love and hate him. On the one hand, he maintained throughout his career that reality itself is generated by models (especially images) and that “the map precedes the territory.” For him, a simulacrum is a copy so far removed from the original that the referent no longer matters. We often understand and even construct reality in terms of simulation—we often encounter it first, or at least find it more alluring. “Sex has been replaced by pornography,” he wrote, “and knowledge has been replaced by information.” In his world, images rule.
However, in his view, art has long been “staged to disappear” and has become indistinguishable from commerce, making it impossible to maintain a critical distance. He made this unforgettable point in a 1987 lecture at the Whitney Museum of American Art before a sold-out crowd, with thousands vying for tickets. Some art lovers in the audience felt betrayed when he declared them irrelevant.
At that time, Baudrillard was already a star in the New York art world, working at art forumon the editorial board, and wrote catalog articles for Barbara Kruger, Sophie Kahler, and Mary Boone. His English-language publisher, Sylvère Lotringer of Semiotext(e), had explicitly marketed his work to artists and curators who shared his belief that it was impossible to produce anything truly new amid the excess of images in late capitalism. As Baudrillard once memorably said: “What do you do after the orgy?”—that is, now that everything is available and allowed, now that everything has been accomplished, what is left that is tempting or new?
new yorkerPeter Schjeldahl calls the fall of 1986 “the season of simulationism,” the simulationist (or new geography) movement that arose in honor of Baudrillard and was led by Peter Halley, Ashley Bickerton, and Jeff Koons. But as The MatrixBaudrillard denied that they used his ideas. These artists echo his claims by using media aesthetics and commodification in ironic ways consumer association (1970) “There is no escape…the only solution is to adopt a distant and interesting stance and, if possible, become an icon.” Criticism under capitalism is a contradiction, and even criticism is commodified. But Baudrillard didn’t say “If you can’t beat them, join them.” He wanted to push the logic of a system—art, politics, criticism—to the extreme until it collapses. You can see why Andy Warhol was his favorite artist.
This instinct to push a concept to its breaking point defined his intellectual temperament. He rarely spoke in the future tense or imagined what would happen if a system exploded. Educated not in philosophy but in German and sociology, he was raised to describe the world as it is, rather than as it might be—an ironic origin story for a man known for deconstructing reality. He grew up during the French occupation and learned German after the war, when the German language and culture were largely unpopular. This means that he encountered the Frankfurt School’s criticisms of popular culture long before they appeared elsewhere, and their influence on his work is evident. In 1966, he defended his thesis before a star-studded panel that included Roland Barthes, Henri Lefebvre, and Pierre Bourdieu, just as the global fascination with French theory was about to explode. Soon, he became a celebrity.
Twenty years later, in response to that infamous Whitney speech, critics staged a protest performance at the White Column entitled “Resistance (Anti-Baudrillard)” featuring forty artists. Some object not to Baudrillard himself but to the idea that nothing is real, fearing that it will lead to political apathy. Baudrillard, coy as ever, sides with the anti-Baudrillardists—because they object to something he never actually said. His point about simulation is often misunderstood, but he’s not saying that things like America or advertising aren’t real. On the contrary, he believed that understanding them as if That they are fictional may bring us closer to the truth. He writes, “Disneyland is presented as fictional in order to make us believe the rest is real”—a model of what America sees itself as, both aspirational and distracting.
Politically, he was more of a provocateur than a radical. He publicly described Nixon’s environmentalism as an attempt to divert attention from the horrors of Vietnam, but was also lukewarm to the student protests in May 1968, which took place while he was a professor in Paris. He later described these protests—even 9/11—as more important as symbols than as events. These remarks, as well as titles of provocative texts, e.g. The Gulf War didn’t happen (1991) have been criticized not because they are boring but because they are insensitive. Baudrillard’s temperament is indeed detached – which can be said to be synonymous with insensitivity. His wife – who was born Martin, although he changed his name to “Marine” – said his sarcasm was as much an intellectual stance as his personality.
Jean BaudrillardTrue to the title of this new biography, it is brief. Part of the reason is that the man reveals little about his life. In a 2005 lecture at the Tilton Gallery, he said he was just “a phantom of myself.” What makes this book so fun to read is that you can see him using his signature wry humor to practice what he preaches, turning abstract ideas into concrete actions, much like a performance artist. It is no exaggeration to say that this book brought his ideas to life. In his writing, he rarely used endnotes and sometimes fabricated quotations, attributing them to Nietzsche or Marx. Chris Kraus once called him “a conceptual artist, a performance philosopher,” and his biographer agreed: “Few thinkers’ lives and works form such a seamless whole.”
Jean Baudrillard: saint clement ii1987.
Courtesy Chateau Chateau Los Angeles
However, Baudrillard was often skeptical of conceptual art, despite his more moderate attitude towards photography. He was very fond of Sophie Calle and wrote about her in the book deadly strategy (1983), because her works are both seductive and empty, always seducing the viewer toward a dissolving meaning. Kahler had been his student, but left school at the age of seventeen. Baudrillard was rumored to have forged her diploma to “appease her father.”
Baudrillard’s own photographs, now on display at the Château Shatto gallery in Los Angeles, are often clever, surprisingly earnest images of America: an empty desert, a TV on in an empty room. He had an abiding fascination with America, dedicating an entire book to it, USA (1986), who wrote that Americans “have no identity…but they do have beautiful teeth.”
For Baudrillard, photography has the power to make the world both less banal and more fascinating. What he likes about photographs is their “silence.” He believed that, using canted angles, strange crops or reflections, fine art photography could retain a sense of mystery—maintain allure—while simple documentary images had the potential to become “obscene,” leaving nothing to the imagination. In other words, photos can make the world smaller and stranger. In his writing, he often sounds fatalistic, but his art is imbued with a glimmer of hope: He wanted his paintings, like those he showed at the 1993 Venice Biennale, to resist simulacra by defamiliarizing reality, creating new patterns rather than replicating old ones.
His last article, “War Porn” (2006), considered the Abu Ghraib photos: horrific, sadistic, and patently obscene. He had spent his life defending seduction over obscenity, but here he could not deny the power of the latter. He acknowledged that the images undermined rather than strengthened the system by revealing what was really going on. He realizes that even in a world where everything seems available and visible, we can still sometimes be shocked.
Baudrillard died the following year, 2007. Yet, as a recent conference slogan quipped, while “Baudrillard may no longer analyze our world,” “he already does.” This new biography not only allows us to speculate on what he thought about our time, but also to ask: What would Baudrillard have done? Do?
