Jean Baudrillard

This is more of a brainstorm than a post, but when I was talking about Jean Baudrillard's this morning over breakfast, it dawned on me that France had a second enlighment during the 20th Century.

The majority of the most influential French philosophers were born in the 1920s and most of them either studied, worked with or new each other through the French university system throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

They all oohed and aahed at Georges Bataille and Albert Camus. Then there was Jean Paul Sartre and his lifemate, Simone de Beauvoir was a notorious organizer and party animal.

It seems like all of these people at one point of another studied or worked with Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Michele Blanchot, or Claude Levi Strauss.

Michele Foucault was one of the few people who knew Blanchot personally. He was good friends at one point with Jacques Derrida and a had a falling out with Sartre.

Jean Baudrillard studied with Roland Barthes and so did Julia Kristeva.

Then there's Deleuze and Guattari. Everybody knew of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's magical and tempestuous working relationship.

"The university is in ruins ... Power ... no longer believes in the university. It knows fundamentally that it is only a zone of the shelter and surveillance of a whole class of a certain age, it therefore has only to select – it will find its elite elsewhere, or by other means. Diplomas are worthless ..."

Jean Baudrillard is the philosopher I seem to always forget.

I don't know which one came first into my hands, whether it was The System of Objects (Radical Thinkers) (Radical Thinkers) or For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. All I know is that Baudrillard (along with Roland Barthes) was one of the first people to show me how to think about humanity not as a given but as a deliberate construction stemming from our desire, fear and lust for Power.

Baudrillard, through his look at American culture, his ponderings on advertising and his photographic musings, taught me to look at Man and Woman literally as auto (self-made) nomies (signs). I learned with him that History becomes in this quest for autonomy, a matrix of Power through meaningful domination.

I learned with Baudrillard, far before the creation of the web and the proliferation of the anonymous personae that litter the blogosphere, that we are fictions battling to be taken on as truths. Twenty years ago and before we even heard of blogs as noise machines, I learned from hims that it is not truth we seek to unravel through writing, punditry or blogging but the spectacle of being truthful.

I have much to thank Baudrillard for his gift of knowledge even if it is a knowledge that I always seem to forget. He has inspired my distrut of cultural absolutes (truth, evidence) and its perpetuation institutions (academia, media) through his piercing discussions of American culture. Ironically, he made very real and accessible the Marxist and Nietzschean philosphies that inform my creations. He ended up making real the unreal reality of reality makers.

After the jump you'll find Arthur Kroker's euology forwarded to me from the C-NET listserve.