Jean Baudrillard: biography, quotes. Baudrillard as a photographer

Let's start with meaningful words: "If people say - time is running out. When time says - people leave ". In relation to the author of this quote, its meaning is enriched with new meanings. When Jean Baudrillard left, it turned out that he had said so much about the time and society in which he lived, that his personality and creativity had acquired timeless significance.

He was a man who was looking for new ways in everything he did - in philology, in sociology, in philosophy, in literature and even in the art of photography.

Grandson of the peasant

He was born in the north of France, in the city of Reims, July 27, 1929. The ancestors of his family always worked on the ground, only parents became employees. For the formation of a fairly basic or secondary school - this was believed in the Baudrillard family. Jean was able to enter the Sorbonne, where he studied German studies. He said later that he became the first in the family, who received a university education, and this caused a break with his parents and with the environment where his childhood passed. A thorough, stocky man with a round face of a peasant, who liked to smoke homemade cigarettes, entered a small caste of influential French intellectuals.

Jean Baudrillard, whose biography was associated for a long time with the teaching of the German language and literature, since 1956 has been working in a secondary school. At the same time, he collaborates with many "left" publications, publishing in them literary critical essays. In these articles, as in the translations of Peter Weiss and Berthold Brecht, a figurative, ironic, paradoxical style of exposition is grinded, which distinguished even the most complex scientific texts of Baudrillard.

Sociology Teacher

In 1966 he defended his thesis on sociology at the University of Nanterre-la-Défense. The campuses on the outskirts of Paris in the late 1960s are a hotbed of "leftist" ideas, a boiling cauldron, from which the student riots of 1968 burst out. Radical "leftist" ideas attracted little to the independent nature of Baudrillard, although he recalled that he had participated in anti-war protests that had grown into a strike - in events that nearly upset de Gaulle's government. Perhaps, it was then that one of the most famous statements of Baudrillard was born: "The silence is the loudest ..."

At the University of Paris-X Nanterre, and since 1986 Paris-Dauphin IX - two out of thirteen, which constituted the Sorbonne, J. Baudrillard served as a senior lecturer (assistant professor), and then a professor of sociology. At that time many prominent scientists worked there: Henri Lefevre, Roland Bart, Pierre Bourdieu. After the publication of the first serious works, Baudrillard began to enjoy great authority among the creators of modern philosophy.

The neo-Marxist

Jean Baudrillard was fond of Marxism, and even translated some of the works of the founders of scientific communism - Marx and Engels. But this influence was of a paradoxical nature, as manifested in the study of him and other philosophical theories. The penetration into the essence of ideas followed their application for the analysis of modernity, and ended with attempts at complete reform or sharp criticism. As one of his aphorisms reads: "New thoughts are like love: they wear out."

The "System of Things" (1968) and the "Consumer Society" (1970) are works in which Jean Baudrillard used certain provisions of communist theory to examine contemporary problems of sociology.

Mythical "society of abundance", which was considered to be the goal of the romance of the industrial revolution, has turned into a civilization where the main goal is to meet the accepted standards that form the advertisement of services and goods. The ideal created by it is continuous consumption. The Marxist view of production relations, as the main criterion for assessing society in the modern world of signs and symbols, is hopelessly outdated.

Neonihilist

A harsh criticism of the current state of society is gradually becoming the dominant of Baudrillard's publications. The work "In the Shadow of the Silent Majority, or the End of the Social" (1983) contains the assertion that the modern era is approaching the frontier behind which disintegration and collapse. The former class structure of society has disappeared, giving rise to emptiness between the individual masses of the people, which are also losing their real outlines.

Human community becomes a fiction. Jean Baudrillard, whose quotes are unique in accuracy and expressiveness, writes: "Citizens are questioned so often that they have lost all opinions." He denies the masses the ability to constructive political representation. All ideologies - religious, political or philosophical - are lifeless because they are deprived of specificity by generalization on the part of the law that does not distinguish them and the availability of a ready-made collection of labels that they are endowed with.

Postmodernist

The polemical properties of Baudrillard's critical texts aroused a violent protest reaction among some, and others were given the occasion to declare him the high priest of postmodernism, which he also actively opposed. Despite the high concentration of rejection of the ongoing social processes, which saturates Baudrillard's works, the philosophy of postmodernism seems to him a dejection, or even regression.

The essence of postmodernity, which consists in the creation of new artificial systems through an endless game with images and concepts from various areas, does not seem to him to be progressive and creative. However, it was very difficult for him to disown the ranks of the "guru of postmodernism" type. Too explicit was the virtuosity with which he expressed his ideas with words, too fascinating was the game of images and meanings in his texts, and irony and black humor from Baudrillard became almost a separate meme.

The ideologist of the Matrix

One of Baudrillard's most famous theories is concentrated in the book "Simulacra and Simulation" (1981). It lies in the concept of "hyperreality", in that we live in a world where the simulated feelings and experiences have replaced the real thing. Bearers of this hyper-reality, the "bricks" of which it consists, are simulacra. The meaning of them in reference to a thing or concept, which means that they themselves are just a simulation. Everything is modeled: the material world and emotions. We do not know anything about the real world, we judge everything from a different point of view, we look through someone else's lens.

The relevance of this idea to the Russian reader is fixed by Pelevin in "Generation P", and for the whole world - in the cult kinotrilogy of the Wachowski brothers "The Matrix" (1999). The reference to Baudrillard in the film is shown directly - in the form of the book "Simulacra and Simulation," from which the main character - the hacker Neo - made a cache for illegal things, ie, the book itself became a simulation of the book.

Jean Baudrillard reluctantly talked about his involvement in this trilogy, arguing that his ideas in it are incomprehensible and perverted.

Traveler

In the 1970s, the scientist traveled the world a lot. In addition to Western Europe, he visited Japan and Latin America. The result of his visit to the United States was the book "America" (1986). This philosophical and artistic essay is not a tourist guide, not a tourist's report. The book gives a vivid analysis of the "original version of modernity", compared to which Europe hopelessly lagged behind the ability to change, to create a utopian and eccentric hyperreality.

He was struck by the creation of this hyper-reality - the superficiality of American culture, which he, however, does not condemn, but simply states. Interesting reasoning Baudrillard about the results of the Cold War. With the victory of the United States, the reality of this world becomes even more illusory.

The trip to Japan turned out to be significant for Baudrillard that he became the owner of the modern apparatus, after which his passion for photo art reached a new level.

Photographer

As he did not consider himself a philosopher, he never called himself a photographer, and the popularity that he acquired in that capacity arose without his desire. It is clear that Baudrillard as a photographer remained as independent and original thinker as a philosopher or writer. His way of looking at things is unique. He said that his task is to achieve objectivity in reflecting the object and its environment, in which the nature itself will show what it wants to make visible.

His photographs, published in the form of several albums, Baudrillard's approach to photography were the subject of serious discussions among professionals. His posthumous exhibition "Vanishing Methods" from 50 photographs was of great interest in many countries.

The genius of the aphorism

Very few people could express a thought in such a way that its depth and sharpness were preserved even after the translation. Some aphorisms - the continuation of arguments on scientific and philosophical themes, others - have purely literary merit, similar to the brilliance of the advertising slogan:

• "Dry water - just add water."
• "The pleasure from the feeling of water on the lips is higher than from swallowing."
• "Statistics - the same form of fulfillment of desires, as well as dreams."
• "I only have two shortcomings: a bad memory and ... something else ..."
• "The weak always gives way to the strong, and only the strongest gives way to everyone."
• "The saddest thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks cunning and, consequently, intelligence."
• "God exists, but I do not believe in it."
• "I feel like I'm witnessing my absence."

"Death is meaningless" - Jean Baudrillard also liked to repeat these words. Biography, briefly reflected in two dates (27.07.1929 - 06.03.2007), included, among other things, the space volume of intellectual work, which makes it easy to believe in the truth of this statement.